Anthony Leggett

Early life and education

Leggett was born on 26 March 1938, in Camberwell, south London, and raised Catholic. His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire; Leggett's grandfather broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer. His mother's parents were of Irish descent; her father had moved to Britain and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham. His maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties, was sent out to domestic service at the age of twelve.

His father and mother were each the first in their families to receive a university education; they met and became engaged while students at the Institute of Education at the University of London, but were unable to get married for some years because his father had to care for his own mother and siblings. His father worked as a secondary school teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. His mother also taught secondary school mathematics for a time, but had to give this up when he was born. He was eventually followed by two sisters, Clare and Judith, and two brothers, Terence and Paul, all raised in their parents' Roman Catholic faith. Leggett ceased to be a practising Catholic in his early twenties.

Soon after he was born, his parents bought a house in Upper Norwood, south London. When he was 18 months old, WWII broke out and he was evacuated to Englefield Green, a small village in Surrey on the edge of the great park of Windsor Castle, where he stayed for the duration of the war. After the end of the war, he returned to the Upper Norwood house and lived there until 1950; his father taught at a school in north-east London and his mother looked after the five children full-time. He attended the local Catholic primary school and, following a successful performance in the 11-plus, which he took rather earlier than most, transferred to Wimbledon College.

He later attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit school in Old Windsor. He and his two younger brothers, Terrence and Paul, attended Beaumont as a consequence of his father's appointment to teach science at the college. While there, Leggett primarily studied classics, since that was generally regarded as the most prestigious field at the time; this study led directly to his Greats degree while at Oxford. Despite Leggett's emphasis on classics at Beaumont, his father ran an evening 'science club' for his younger son and a couple of others. In his last year at Beaumont, Leggett won every single prize for the subjects that he studied that year.

Leggett won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in December 1954 and entered the university the following year with the intention of reading the degree technically known as Literae Humaniores (classics). After completing his first degree he began a second undergraduate degree, this time in physics at Merton College, Oxford. One person who was willing to overlook Leggett's unorthodox credentials was Dirk ter Haar, then a reader in theoretical physics and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; so Leggett signed up for research under ter Haar's supervision. As with all of ter Haar's students in that period, the tentatively assigned thesis topic was "Some Problems in the Theory of Many-Body Systems", which left a considerable degree of latitude.

Dirk took a great interest in the personal welfare of his students and their families, and was meticulous in making sure they received adequate support; indeed, he encouraged Leggett to apply for a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen, which he held from 1963 to 1967. In the end Leggett's thesis consisted of studies of two somewhat disconnected problems in the general area of liquid helium, one on higher-order phonon interaction processes in superfluid ⁴He and the other on the properties of dilute solutions of ⁴He in normal liquid ³He (a system which turned out to be much less experimentally accessible than the other side of the phase diagram, dilute solutions of ³He in ⁴He). The University of Oxford awarded Leggett an Honorary DLitt in June 2005.