Philip W. Anderson

Philip Warren Anderson (December 13, 1923 – March 29, 2020) was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nevill Mott and John Van Vleck "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems."

Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking (including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. He is also responsible for naming the field of physics that is now known as condensed matter physics.