Quantum physics pioneer and Nobel laureate Kosterlitz’s Fulbright experience “opened his eyes to what physics is all about.”   

If you have ever observed water condensing from vapor in the air and then freezing into solid ice, you have observed what physicists describe as a “phase change” of matter. Phase changes can also occur on the sub-atomic, or quantum level. Fulbright Scholar John Michael Kosterlitz along with colleagues David Thouless and Duncan Haldane, were awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for their use of the mathematical field of topology to describe quantum phase changes. Kosterlitz, Thouless, and Haldane were able to explain why superconductivity—the property that lets electric current flow without resistance—disappears at high temperatures. Kosterlitz has said that he hopes their work on quantum topology can be applied to developing new materials – such as thin magnetic films—that can run quantum computers.

Kosterlitz’s parents escaped Hitler’s Germany in 1934. German laws under the Nazis forbade his Christian mother from marrying his Jewish father and banned him from practicing medicine in Berlin. Fortunately, his father was offered a position as a biochemist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where his parents married and where Kosterlitz was born. Kosterlitz showed an early aptitude for mathematics and sciences, and his parents encouraged him to pursue degrees in those subjects.

Kosterlitz earned his doctorate from Oxford where he studied high energy physics and the precursors to modern string theory. It was as a postdoctoral fellow at Birmingham University that he met future collaborator and co-Nobel laureate David Thouless, who introduced Kosterlitz to “concepts and ideas I knew nothing about. He talked about superfluidity in films, crystals in two dimensions, vortices, dislocations, topology and many other related ideas.” Thouless and Kosterlitz began a collaboration that has been central to their careers, publishing papers together in the early 1970s that provided the foundation of their Nobel-prize winning work on topological phase transitions in two-dimensional or “ultra-thin” spaces.

Thouless received his doctorate at Cornell under another Nobel-prize laureate and Fulbright alumnus, Hans Bethe. He persuaded Kosterlitz to attend Cornell, which he did with the support of the Fulbright Program.  Kosterlitz “was excited by the prospect of learning about phase transitions and critical phenomena” from their faculty. It was a critical juncture for both physicists and their future Nobel work. Kosterlitz said that working with Michael Fisher, Ken Wilson, and graduate student David Nelson at Cornell “opened my eyes to what physics is all about, how important experimental data are and how to choose the problems to work on.” After Kosterlitz returned to Birmingham University in the United Kingdom as a tenured lecturer in 1977, he published a paper with Nelson using experimentation to prove his and Thouless’s mathematical theories.

In 1982, Kosterlitz was offered a professorship at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He has continued to engage in significant international collaborations. He has worked with Enzo Granato of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, Tapio Ala-Nissila in Finland, and has been a guest instructor at the Korea Institute of Advanced Study in Seoul, South Korea. At Brown, he continues to teach and mentor early career physicists through his classes on topological matter, mathematical models of engineering, and physics and quantum theory.

Quotes, photo and biography adapted from the autobiography of J. Michael Kosterlitz submitted to the Nobel Foundation; originally published by Science History Publications/USA, division Watson Publishing International LLC, Sagamore Beach, 2017. Republished online at. J. Michael Kosterlitz – Biographical – NobelPrize.org Accessed Thu. 3 Apr 2025.