Haldane, Frederick Duncan Michael, 1951–, British physicist, b. London, England, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1978. Haldane taught at the Univ. of Southern California (1981–85, 1987–90) and worked at Bell Laboratories (1985–87) before becoming a professor at Princeton in 1990. Haldane shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” work that has potential applications in materials science and electronics. Collectively, the three researchers used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual states of matter. Building on earlier work in superconductivity by Kosterlitz and Thouless, Haldane discovered in the 1980s how concepts in topology, a branch of mathematics, can be used to understand the properties of chains of small magnets found in some materials.
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