Dylan Loeb McClain

The cause was heart and respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia, his wife, Nancy Cosgrove Mullis, said.

The process for analyzing DNA that Mullis invented is called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. It replicates a single strand of DNA millions of times, enabling scientists to pinpoint a segment of the strand and amplify it for identification. Polymerase, an enzyme that synthesizes polymers and nucleic acids, is essential in creating DNA and RNA, the molecules that are responsible for coding DNA.

Before PCR, amplifying DNA took weeks, because it had to be generated in bacteria. Once Mullis’ process was perfected, it took only hours, opening up a world of possibilities.

Today, his method is used to detect genetic mutations that can lead to diagnoses of diseases, like sickle cell anemia; analyze ancient sources of DNA, like bones; assist in obtaining crime scene evidence; and determine paternity.

It was used as well to decode and map the entire human DNA as part of the Human Genome Project, the landmark international research effort that ran from 1990 to 2003.

As he told the story in his Nobel lecture, Mullis found his inspiration one night in 1983 while driving to his cabin in Mendocino, California.

At the time, Mullis was a lab director for Cetus Corp., one of the first biotechnology companies, which had been founded in Berkeley, California. His lab made short strands of DNA molecules called oligonucleotides, and had become so efficient at it that it was making more than the company could use. Worried that some of his lab workers might be laid off because of their overproductivity, Mullis was searching for a way to use more of the molecules.

As he drove, he considered the challenges scientists faced in decoding and identifying problems in human DNA. There are billions of DNA base pairs, he knew, but they had proved exceedingly difficult to analyze because there was no easy way to focus on small groups of them.

Mullis knew that the oligonucleotides bond easily with DNA. The problem was how to isolate the DNA that scientists might want to analyze. Mullis, pondering ways to control the oligonucleotides, suddenly realized that they didn’t have to be controlled at all. The bonding would have a useful side effect: It would double the amount of DNA that scientists were interested in. The process could then be repeated over and over, expanding the DNA sample exponentially. It would be like pumping up a microbe to the size of a dinosaur.

Indeed, the science of PCR, because it allows for the unlimited replication of small bits of DNA, was one of the inspirations of “Jurassic Park,” the Michael Crichton novel about a theme park of cloned dinosaurs that Steven Spielberg turned into a movie franchise.

Though Mullis came up with the concept of PCR, proving that it worked was another matter; months after his breakthrough, he had still not done so. He had not written a paper to validate his idea.

“Mullis as an experimentalist is sort of hit and miss,” Thomas J. White, who got Mullis his job at Cetus, told The New York Times in 1998.

As a result, two other Cetus scientists, Randall K. Saiki and Henry A. Erlich, were put on the project, and the three published a paper about the process in 1985. No one, however, disputed that it was Mullis who had first figured it out.

For his discovery, Cetus awarded Mullis $10,000, but the company later sold the rights to his PCR process to the pharmaceutical giant F. Hoffmann-La Roche for $300 million. Mullis, believing he had been denied a just reward, remained bitter about it for the rest of his life.

He shared his Nobel Prize with Michael Smith, a British-born scientist, who was also cited for advances in DNA research.

In 1995, defense lawyers in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson enlisted Mullis as an expert witness because his PCR method had been used to analyze blood samples in the case. But he was ultimately not called to testify; prosecutors had made it clear that if he did take the stand they would try to undermine his credibility by bringing up his acknowledged history of drinking and drug use.

Kary Banks Mullis was born on Dec. 28, 1944, in Lenoir, North Carolina. He was the second of four sons of Cecil and Bernice Alberta (Barker) Mullis. His father was a furniture salesman. The family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, when Kary was 5. He got his start in science there one summer when, at 13, he designed and made his own rockets, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.

Mullis attend Dreher High School in Columbia and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, graduating in 1966 with a degree in chemistry. He then headed to California, arriving in Berkeley around the time of the Summer of Love in 1967. As he spoke and wrote about it in later years, he used LSD liberally. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972.

Mullis took a detour from science after that, trying his hand at writing fiction and then managing a bakery for two years. He then headed for Kansas, where his wife at the time was enrolling in medical school. He did a postdoctoral research fellowship in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, finishing in 1977. He returned to California and went to work at Cetus in 1979.

After the discovery of PCR, his career trailed off. He quit Cetus in 1986 and thereafter mostly stuck to the lecture circuit.

Mullis’ marriages to Richards Haley, Gail Hubbell and Cynthia Gibson ended in divorce. He married Nancy Cosgrove in 1997. Along with her, he is survived by a daughter, Louise Olsen; two sons, Christopher and Jeremy; two brothers, Brent and David; and two grandchildren. Another brother, Robert, died several years ago.

Mullis was naturally contrarian and none too fond of many scientists. “Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it,” he told The Times in 1998. “I don’t mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.”

He was skeptical of climate science and expressed doubts that HIV causes AIDS, though Nancy Mullis said he had been misunderstood. “He thought it was premature to assign blame to one tiny retrovirus,” she said.

In 1998, Mulls gathered some of his controversial ideas — and unfiltered moments — into a book, “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.” In one anecdote, on receiving the prestigious Japan Prize for his research, he recalled meeting the empress of Japan and calling her “Sweetie.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the science writer Dick Teresi called the book “darkly joyous” and an “autobiography of the nervous system of an extraordinary chemist.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/science/kary-b-mullis-dead.html" id="4ff31cfd-9637-35c5-a95e-0735ba8c0ab4">The New York Times</a>.

Kary B. Mullis, Who Found a Way to Analyze DNA, Dies at 74

Kary B. Mullis, a biochemist who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering a way to analyze DNA easily and cheaply and thus pave the way for major advances in medical diagnostics, molecular biology and forensic science, died on Aug. 7 at his home in Newport Beach, California. He was 74.

His son, Jeffrey, confirmed the death. He said his father had entered Newton Wellesley Hospital that morning having difficulty breathing. No specific cause was given.

Glauber’s seminal work addressed an area of research that had been largely ignored in quantum physics. For much of the first half of the 20th century, physicists had concentrated on trying to understand the nature of matter, neglecting the field of optics. That began to change with the development of the laser in 1960. Physicists wanted to understand how it worked vis-à-vis quantum mechanics, the mysterious rules that govern subatomic particles.

For his part, Glauber became intrigued by an experiment, performed in 1956 by British astronomers Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss, to measure the apparent angular diameter of visible stars. (The angular size of a star is essentially how large the dot of light appears in the night sky.) The two scientists had set up two detectors, which received photons and sent them to a central device for measurements.

The results confirmed a central idea of quantum physics: that light, although made up of particles, also behaved as if it came in continuous waves. What was missing was a mathematical framework to explain what was happening. Glauber set to work.

Beginning with a landmark 1963 paper titled “The Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence,” he used sophisticated techniques to apply quantum mechanics to different forms of light. Light had previously been analyzed only by using classical, pre-quantum physics methods and mathematics.

Part of what Glauber confirmed was that there was nothing inherently contradictory in the idea that the energy of particles could interfere with one another both constructively and destructively, just as waves had long been known to do.

Glauber’s theory about how photons interacted contradicted part of the work of Paul Dirac, the British theoretical physicist whose equations had created the mathematical foundation for quantum physics. Glauber explained in his Nobel lecture that Dirac had written that photons could only interfere with themselves.

“Well, forgive me, this is quantum mechanical scripture, but it is also nonsense,” Glauber said.

Glauber’s theory was able to explain the differences between the diffuse light of a light bulb, which is composed of electromagnetic radiation of many frequencies, and the intense beam of a laser, which has a constant frequency and phase. His theory helped lay the groundwork for developing quantum computers and quantum cryptography, and for the use of quantum mechanics to create an unbreakable code.

“It was Glauber’s theory which was the basis for all of that,” said Daniel Kleppner, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You didn’t need Glauber’s theory to invent the laser, but you needed Glauber’s theory to understand its properties.”

For his discovery, Glauber received half the Nobel Prize in 2005. The other half was shared by John L. Hall, an American, and Theodor W. Hansch, of Germany, who were recognized for their work on precision spectroscopy.

Roy Jay Glauber was born Sept. 1, 1925, in New York City to Emanuel and Felicia (Fox) Glauber. His father was a traveling salesman who took his wife, who was trained as an elementary schoolteacher, and his son on the road with him.

“After long hours spent driving through endless farmlands,” Roy Glauber wrote in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee, “we would stay overnight at the houses of farmers who had hung the sign ‘Tourists-Vacancy’ near the road — never two successive nights in the same house. That was long before the days of roadside motels.”

The stock market crash of 1929 ended the family’s itinerant ways; his father lost his job, and the family had to move back to New York, although again the family bounced among living quarters in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.

Glauber became interested in science and astronomy as a young teenager. He built a telescope by hand, even grinding his own mirror, and he started attending lectures at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.

In fall 1938, Glauber entered the Bronx High School of Science, which had just opened. He graduated three years later and was accepted to Harvard.

In October 1943, during his sophomore year, Glauber was recruited to join the top-secret program to build an atomic bomb known as the Manhattan Project, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He arrived by train and shared a ride to the lab with mathematician John von Neumann.

At Los Alamos, Glauber was given the job of checking calculations on the critical mass necessary to explode the bomb.

Returning to Harvard, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1946 and earned his doctorate there in 1949. His thesis adviser was Julian Schwinger, the theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics.

After finishing at Harvard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the Manhattan Project, invited Glauber to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Oppenheimer was the director. Glauber ended up collaborating with Wolfgang Pauli, who had won the physics Nobel in 1945.

Glauber spent a year teaching at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (replacing Richard Feynman, a future Nobel winner, who had gone on sabbatical to Brazil) before returning to Harvard in 1952 to teach. He would spend the rest of his career there.

Glauber’s marriage to Cynthia Rich in 1960 ended in divorce in 1975. He lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, outside Boston.

In addition to his son, Jeffrey, he is survived by a daughter, Valerie Glauber Fleischman; a sister, Jacqueline Gordon; his companion of 13 years, Atholie Rosett; and five grandchildren.

Glauber was known for his sense of humor. Before receiving the Nobel Prize, he participated in the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel ceremony held at Harvard to honor unusual or trivial scientific achievements. His role was as “keeper of the broom,” which entailed sweeping the stage of paper airplanes thrown during the event.

And in his Nobel lecture, he began: “Of course, we have surely had light quanta for more than a hundred years on Earth. In fact, ever since the good Lord said, ‘Let there be quantum electrodynamics,’ which is a modern translation, of course, from the Hebrew.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/obituaries/roy-j-glauber-dead.html" id="9a668460-d617-3b4c-afe5-9565c9b64961">The New York Times</a>.

Roy J. Glauber, 93, Dies; Nobel Laureate Explored Behavior of Light

Roy J. Glauber, a theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 for using quantum theory to explain the field of optics and how light interacts with matter, laying the foundation for the field of quantum electrodynamics, died Dec. 26 in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 93.

His death, at a hospital there, was announced by the U.S. Chess Federation. His wife, Michele Merrell Lyman, said the cause was cancer. He lived in Windsor, New York, about 15 miles east of Binghamton.

The Fischer-Spassky match was one of the most ballyhooed competitive events of the 1970s, a Cold War confrontation in Reykjavik, Iceland, between the two most brilliant chess players in the world, the elegant Russian grandmaster Spassky and the enigmatic American Fischer. It was the first professional match to offer a prize fund of $250,000 — an unheard-of amount then (the equivalent of more than $1.5 million today).

The match, beginning in July, was not scheduled to be televised live. But at PBS, seeking to capitalize on the event nonetheless — and to fill airtime during the slow summer months — producer Michael Chase conceived of a program that would follow the match, move by move, from afar. And he thought that Lyman, a top American player who had taught the game to Chase, would be the ideal person to host it.

The idea was to direct the program primarily to the public television viewership in New York, where Fischer, who had scraped his way out Brooklyn to become the most powerful player his country had ever produced, was a hometown hero. Then it would be made available to public TV outlets across the country.

Lyman set to work in a public TV studio in Albany, installing two upright demonstration chess boards — one to show the current position of the game in progress, the other to analyze it. A few chairs were reserved for guests, who in the early going were sometimes recruited from the local area based on whether they knew how to play the game.

A phone line was set up to relay moves from the match. Every time there was a move — 30 minutes might pass between one and the next — a bell would ding in the studio. Then a woman would come on to the set with a piece of paper listing the move.

No one expected the show to be a hit. It was chess, after all. But, astonishingly, it became the highest-rated program in public television history up to then.

On the first day of the show — July 11, 1972, when the match began — the plan was to go on for two hours, followed by updates. That plan changed quickly.

So many people called to praise the broadcast, Lyman told The New York Times in 2008, that “we pre-empted ‘Sesame Street,’ and we became a five-hour, move-by-move show.”

“And we did that for the next 21 games,” he said.

Though he was an accomplished player — he had been ranked as high as No. 18 in the country — the 35-year-old Lyman was an unlikely choice for television, a frizzy-haired, doughy-faced guide who had come to the show with zero TV experience. Yet he soon attracted a following, not least because of his unpolished manner — charmingly insouciant and sometimes bumbling.

During the broadcasts, Lyman, wearing a black suit in a hot studio, would run back and forth between the two boards with large cutouts of chess pieces stuffed into his pockets. Often as not, the pieces would tumble to the floor, and Lyman would stoop to retrieve them, all the while trying to maintain eye contact with the camera.

In the meantime, he would be receiving instructions from Chase, the impresario, through an earphone. Sometimes Lyman would look up, startled, as if he were searching for the disembodied voice, and bark out, “What’s that, Mike?”

Within a week the show was regularly drawing 1 million viewers in New York City and another million or more from around the country. At one point, The New York Post did an informal survey of bars around New York City to see what they were watching. All but one were tuned to chess.

And much to the satisfaction of New Yorkers, if not Americans everywhere, Fischer won the match and, from Mayor John V. Lindsay, received the key to the city.

Shelbourne Richard Lyman, who preferred to go by Shelby, was born on Oct. 22, 1936, to Rachel and Louis Lyman in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where his father was an intern. He grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston and went to Boston Latin School and then Harvard University, graduating in 1961 with a degree in social relations that covered psychology, anthropology and sociology.

He moved back to New York City after graduation, where he worked for 3 1/2 years as a lecturer in sociology at City College before becoming a full-time chess teacher.

Shelby had learned chess at age 9 from his uncle Harry Lyman, who had been New England champion. By his midteens, Shelby had won the Boston Championship. At 27, he won the championship of the Marshall Chess Club in New York, one of the country’s oldest and strongest clubs.

The PBS show did not make him rich; indeed, he wasn’t paid at all, though his expenses were covered. His plans to write books and otherwise profit from his celebrity mostly fizzled out as the Bobby Fischer-inspired chess mania subsided in the United States, partly a result of Fischer’s decision to go into self-imposed exile and not play again publicly for another 20 years. Lyman was able to make a living by writing a syndicated chess column that ran in as many as 82 newspapers at its peak.

He did get a chance to reprise his role as a chess commentator on public television in 1986, when he handled the broadcast for the world chess championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, which Kasparov narrowly won.

In addition to his wife, Lyman’s survivors include three stepchildren, Charles, Corey and Casey Goff. A first marriage ended in annulment; a second, to Marcy May, ended in divorce.

If the show did not bring Lyman lasting fame, it did give him a taste of at least temporary stardom. Bruce Pandolfini, a chess master and teacher who was recruited to provide expert analysis on the broadcast, recalled having dinner with Lyman in a New York City restaurant one evening when suddenly a man rushed over exclaiming, “Shelby Lyman? I am so glad to meet you.”

Lyman replied, “Do I know you?”

He did not recognize the actor Dustin Hoffman.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/obituaries/shelby-lyman-dead.html" id="ef9ad408-9004-314e-ab04-6955eb17ea3f">The New York Times</a>.

Shelby Lyman, 82, Dies; Unlikely Star of a Fischer-Spassky Broadcast

Shelby Lyman, a chess master who found fleeting fame in 1972 by hosting an improbably popular show on live television as it followed the historic world championship chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, died on Aug. 11 in Johnson City, New York. He was 82.

The death was confirmed by his friend Susan Polgar, a former women’s world chess champion, on her website.

Benko was among the final eight participants in the tournaments to determine a challenger for the world championship in 1959 and 1962. Both times he failed to advance, finishing well behind his competitors.

In 1970, Benko again qualified for the world championship cycle. Already 42 and past his peak as a competitive chess player, he ceded his place to Fischer, who was 15 years his junior.

“I didn’t have a real chance,” Benko said.

Among Western players, Fischer was considered the best hope of unseating Boris Spassky as champion.

Benko was paid $2,000 by the U.S. Chess Federation for giving up his spot, though he said the money was actually a fee to assist the players in that year’s Interzonal Tournament, the first step on the road to the world championship.

Decades later, after Fischer was off the world chess stage and had become a recluse, Benko was one of the few people with whom he stayed in contact. The two spoke every week.

Relations between Benko and Fischer had once been far worse. They both competed in the 1962 Candidates tournament in Curaçao, which would determine the challenger for the world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik.

Arthur Bisguier, an American grandmaster, had been sent by the U.S. Chess Federation to assist them, primarily by helping them analyze their adjourned positions. One night, Benko went looking for Bisguier and found him in Fischer’s room. He asked Bisguier for help, but Fischer protested, saying that Bisguier was there only to help him, since he had a more legitimate chance of winning. The two men got into a heated argument that Bisguier said ended with punches.

Pal Charles Benko was born in Amiens, France, on July 15, 1928, while his father and mother, who were Hungarian, were on vacation.

His father taught him to play chess when he was 8, but he did not begin playing in tournaments until he was 17, mostly because of the difficulties brought on by World War II. (His father and older brother were sent to Russia to work as laborers, and his mother died just as the war was ending.)

Once he began to play, Benko improved rapidly. He won the Hungarian championship when he was just 20.

In 1952, Benko qualified for the first stage of the world championship cycle, but before he could compete, he tried to defect to the West while playing a tournament near Berlin. He was caught and sent back to Hungary, where he was imprisoned for 16 months. He was freed after Stalin’s death, when many political prisoners were given clemency.

In 1957, while playing another tournament, this time in Reykjavik, Iceland, Benko successfully defected after strolling into the U.S. Embassy. He was allowed to emigrate to the United States, where he settled and eventually became a citizen.

Over his career, Benko played and defeated many of the world’s best players, including four world champions: Fischer, Tigran Petrosian, Mikhail Tal and Vasily Smyslov.

In America, Benko compiled an impressive tournament record, winning or sharing first place in the U.S. Open a record eight times from 1960 to 1974. He was inducted into the U.S. Chess Federation’s Hall of Fame in 1993.

He is survived by his wife, Giselle; their children, Palma and David; and a grandson. He lived in Budapest.

In addition to playing, Benko composed chess problems, winning many international competitions.

Benko also became an expert in the positions and theories arising in the final stages of chess games, an area known as endgame theory. He was considered a world-class authority on the subject, and for decades he wrote a column called “Endgame Lab” for the U.S. Chess Federation’s monthly magazine.

Because of his endgame expertise, he was a sought-after tutor for up-and-coming players, particularly from his native Hungary. Among his students were the Polgar sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, and Peter Leko, who was once the youngest grandmaster in history.

Benko also made some contributions to opening theory. He was an early practitioner of the hypermodern king’s fianchetto opening, and an opening originally called the Volga gambit was renamed the Benko gambit after he studied and began playing it in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But he said that the reason he liked to study the endgame was that it was the purest form of chess.

“It doesn’t change in theory like openings,” he said. “It is permanent. Opening theory is not real chess, I think.”

This article originally appeared in

Pal Benko, 91, Who Ceded His Spot to Bobby Fischer

Pal Benko, a chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for two decades, but who gave up his place in the 1969-72 world championship cycle to Bobby Fischer, paving the way for Fischer to become world champion, died Monday in Budapest, Hungary. He was 91.

The University of Cambridge announced his death but did not provide a cause. Born in Scotland to British parents, Thouless had taught at Cambridge but received his Nobel while affiliated with the University of Washington.

Thouless’ research dealt with condensed-matter physics, and specifically with what happens when matter changes phases — as, for example, when ice melts and becomes a liquid or water boils and becomes steam.

Though phase transitions seem deceptively simple, the mathematics turn out to be exceedingly complex, and important — particularly when one looks at such a transition at the microscopic level using quantum mechanics.

Thouless’ research has real and potential applications to the development and refinement of a wide range of electronic devices, semiconductors and even quantum computers, which might one day use the properties of fundamental particles, like spin, to perform powerful and incredibly fast calculations.

It was in the 1970s, while working at the University of Birmingham in England, that Thouless became interested in whether phase transitions could occur in super-thin, basically two-dimensional materials and turn them into superconductors — that is, materials through which an electrical current could pass with no resistance.

Many scientists thought such transitions were impossible, reasoning that random thermal fluctuations would prevent the proper order of atoms and molecules that is necessary for superconductivity or superfluidity to occur.

Thouless received half the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics. He shared it with two British-born scientists: J. Michael Kosterlitz, who was affiliated with Brown University, and F. Duncan M. Haldane, from Princeton University.

Thouless and Kosterlitz, working together, attacked the problem of phase transitions using topology, a branch of mathematics that focuses on the fundamental shapes of things, looking at what properties of an object are preserved when it is changed or deformed. (Topological surfaces are partly defined by how many holes they have. A doughnut and a coffee cup are considered to be similar because each has one hole.)

Much to the surprise of the scientific world, Thouless and Kosterlitz theorized mathematically that at very low temperatures, some two-dimensional materials are composed of systems of clockwise and counterclockwise spinning vortexes, corresponding to positive and negative charges — and that at such low temperatures, these systems align to permit superconductivity or superfluidity to occur.

But, they concluded, if the temperature of the material rises, causing a phase change, the vortexes split apart, robbing the material of its “super” powers. This phase shift came to be known as the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition.

Later experiments proved the theory correct.

At the time of the Nobel committee’s announcement in 2016, Michael S. Turner, a physicist at the University of Chicago, described the work of Thouless and the others as “truly transformational, with long-term consequences both practical and fundamental.”

In 1982, Thouless brought topology to bear on another problem: the quantum Hall effect.

The Hall effect is named for American physicist Edwin Hall, who in 1879 discovered that when a magnetic field is positioned at a right angle and close to a conductive material through which a current is passing, it creates a voltage difference in the material. (The simple reason is that the magnetic field either attracts or repels the electrons in the current, creating a small electrical potential difference in the material.)

In 1980, a German physicist, Klaus von Klitzing, while repeating Hall’s experiment — but using a thin film cooled to almost absolute zero — found that changes in the conductance, or electrical resistance, of the material, as a function of the magnetic field applied to it, varied in steps, like those of a staircase.

It turned out that it did not matter if the material had many imperfections, thus ensuring that the experiment could be repeated with other flawed materials. That was significant, because it made industrial applications of the discovery much easier.

For his discovery, Klitzing was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985.

Theoreticians wanted to explain Klitzing’s discovery mathematically, so Thouless, working with three research assistants, applied topology to the problem. This led to a landmark paper in 1982 that linked Klitzing’s discovery to the so-called Chern numbers — named after mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern — which are used to characterize topological shapes.

It was for this mathematical insight, as well as his earlier work with Kosterlitz, that Thouless received half the Nobel Prize.

David James Thouless was born Sept. 21, 1934, in Bearsden, Scotland, to Robert and Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, both of whom were originally from England. (He said his surname was a variation on Thewless and Thewlis.) His mother taught English in Manchester, England, before she gave birth to Thouless’ oldest sister, Susan, in 1925. Thouless’ father was a psychology professor at the University of Glasgow and familiar to radio audiences for his programs on thinking critically. He drew on those programs to write the book “Straight and Crooked Thinking” (published in the United States as “How to Think Straight”), which became required reading for students of rhetoric.

Thouless pursued his undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge before earning his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He studied there under Hans Bethe, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967.

While at Cornell, Thouless met and married Margaret Scrase. His wife, who is now a professor emeritus of pathobiology at the University of Washington, survives him. His survivors also include their three children, Michael, Christopher and Helen.

After graduating from Cornell in 1958, Thouless spent a year at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California before joining the Department of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham, where he worked under Rudolf Peierls, another world-renowned physicist.

Thouless remained at Birmingham until 1978. He then taught at Yale University for two years before the appointment at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he worked until 2014. He then returned to Cambridge.

Thouless was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in physics and the Dirac Medal, named for Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum physics, in 1993.

This article originally appeared in <a id="66a2f147-7460-3be0-a965-2803d1884ebe" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/obituaries/david-thouless-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

David Thouless, 84, dies; Nobel Laureate cast light on matter

David J. Thouless, who shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries that used mathematics to explain strange states of matter like superconductivity and superfluidity, died April 6 in Cambridge, England. He was 84.

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