Michael Victor Berry

Sir Michael Victor Berry (born 14 March 1941) is a British theoretical physicist. He is the Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at the University of Bristol.

Berry is known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon observed in both quantum mechanics and classical optics, as well as Berry connection and curvature. He specializes in semiclassical physics (asymptotic physics, quantum chaos), applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics.

Early life and education Berry was brought up in a Jewish family and was the son of a London taxi driver and a dressmaker. Berry earned a BSc in physics from the University of Exeter in 1962 where he met his first wife (a sociology student with whom he had his first child) and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews in 1965. His thesis is titled The diffraction of light by ultrasound.

Career and research He has spent his whole career at the University of Bristol. He was a research fellow, 1965–67; lecturer, 1967–74; reader, 1974–78; Professor of Physics, 1978–88; and Royal Society Research Professor 1988–2006. Since 2006, he has been Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at Bristol University.

Awards and honours He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1982 and knighted in 1996. From 2006 to 2012 he was editor of Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Berry has been given the following prizes and awards:

Maxwell Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1978 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1982 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, 1983 Elected Fellow of the Royal Institution, 1983 Elected Member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, 1986 Bakerian Lecturer, Royal Society, 1987 Elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1989 Dirac Medal, Institute of Physics, 1990 Lilienfeld Prize, American Physical Society, 1990 Royal Medal, Royal Society, 1990 Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics, London Mathematical Society, 1992 Foreign Member: US National Academy of Sciences, 1995 Dirac Medal, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1996 Awarded honorary Doctor of Science degree in Trinity College Dublin, 1996 Kapitsa Medal, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997 Wolf Prize for Physics, Wolf Foundation, Israel, 1998, jointly with Yakir Aharonov Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, 1999 Forder Lectureship, London Mathematical Society, 1999 Foreign Member: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000 (shared with Andre Geim for "The Physics of Flying Frogs"). By 2022 his and Geim's Ig Nobel for the magnetic levitation of a frog was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility. Onsager Medal, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2001 Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 2002 1st and 3rd prizes, Visions of Science, Novartis/Daily Telegraph, 2002 Elected to Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2005 Pólya Prize, London Mathematical Society, 2005 Doctor of Science, honoris causa, University of Glasgow, 2007 Selected Clarivate Citation laureate in Physics in 2009, jointly with Aharonov. Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University in Yerevan, 2012 Lorentz Medal, 2014 Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture, 2019 Institute of Physics Newton Medal and Lecture, 2025