Some days it feels as if 40% of the content on this site is dedicated to dead Nobel Prize winners… David J. Thouless got the Physics gong back in 2016, thanks to his work on “topological phase transitions”. What are topological phase transitions you ask? Well, they’re sudden changes between states of matter. Thouless was already suffering from dementia at the time he won the Nobel Prize, so he was always going to be a smart pick for one of the myriad Nobel Prize theme teams that litter the DDP landscape. The awkwardly named YES, I got the Nobel – but there was no use to write anything are the beneficiaries in this case.
David J. Thouless
21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019
Died aged 84 (unique pick)