Bertrand Halperin

Bert Halperin
Born	(1941-12-06) December 6, 1941 Brooklyn
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Harvard University
Alma mater	Harvard University University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	John J. Hopfield
Known for	Hexatic phase Quantum Hall effect
Notable awards	Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1982) Lars Onsager Prize (2001) Wolf Prize in Physics (2003)

Bertrand I. Halperin is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.

Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood. His mother was Eva Teplitzky Halperin and his father Morris Halperin. His mother was a college administrator and his father a customs inspector. Both his parents were born in Ukraine. His paternal grandmother's family the Maximovs claimed descent from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the BESHT.

He attended Harvard University (class of 1961), and did his graduate work at Berkeley with John J. Hopfield (PhD 1965). In the 1970s, he, together with David R. Nelson, worked out a theory of two-dimensional melting, predicting the hexatic phase before it was experimentally observed by Pindak et al. In the 1980s, he made contributions to the theory of the Integral and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. His recent interests lie in the area of strongly interacting low-dimensional electron systems. In 2001, he was awarded the Lars Onsager Prize. In 2003, he and Anthony J. Leggett were awarded the Wolf Prize in physics.

External links

• Harvard University faculty page
• Wolf Prize page
• Bertrand Halperin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Academic offices
Preceded by Andrew Gleason	Hollis Chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy 1992–present	Succeeded by current incumbent