Sir Michael Berry is Professor Emeritus at Bristol University. He has made numerous important contributions to semi-classical physics (asymptotic physics, quantum chaos) applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics. Among other work, he is well-known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon which has found applications in atomic, condensed matter, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, as well as optics. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1982, and was knighted in 1996. Sir Berry's previous honours include the Dirac Medals of both the Institute of Physics (1990) and the ICTP (1996), the Lilienfeld Prize (1990), the Wolf Prize (1998) and the London Mathematical Society's Polya Prize (2005).
