Biographical 

 

 

The Name

The name Thouless is very rare. Fewer than 150 people with the name live in Britain, almost all of whom are connected to Norwich. This is because it is a relatively new spelling of an old name spelt variously Thules, Thewless, Thewlis etc. Five generations before David, his ancestor John was born Thules. When John’s son, James, was born, both parents were illiterate and the clergyman filling out the baptism certificate wrote what he thought he heard – ‘Thouless.’ It seems that almost everyone with this particular spelling of the name is descended from James.

 

Mother’s Family Background

David’s mother was born Ella Grafton Gorton in 1898. She changed her name to Priscilla when she was studying in Italy, where she found that having a name that translated to “She” in Italian was inconvenient. The family name originates in Gorton, a suburb of Manchester. Her father’s family had been Church of England clergymen back into the 1600s and continued this tradition through her generation. Her grandfather, father, three of her brothers and two of her brothers-in-law were all clergymen. The most prominent of these was her brother Neville Gorton, the Bishop of Coventry who was deeply involved in building the new cathedral after the war.

 

Priscilla was the sixth of seven children. She was taught by a governess who did not like mathematics and influenced her pupil to feel the same way. After her father died, she went to Altrincham High School and then got a scholarship to Manchester University. She gained a BA and MA in literature and taught English at Manchester until David’s older sister Susan was born in 1925.

 

David’s generation, which included 14 first cousins on his mother’s side, were not involved with the church or science. The most notable of his cousins was Assheton Gorton, who was an artistic director of a number of well known films such as Blow Up and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

 

Father’s Family Background and Scientific Interests

David’s father Robert Henry Thouless was born in Norwich in 1894. Robert’s father Henry James Thouless married Maud Harper from Devon who was studying at a Teacher Training College in Norwich. Henry James was a company secretary at Barnards, a Norwich engineering firm. However, his passion in life was natural history, with a particular interest in insects, specifically moths. He served a term as the President of the Norfolk and Norwich Natural History Society and had a bungalow on the edge of a marsh in Wroxham, which was ideal for finding insects. He bequeathed a collection of insects he had collected, which included two named after himself, to the museum in Norwich Castle.

 

Robert had two sisters, Sybil and Margaret. Sybil became a nun and taught school in the order of Notre Dame. The younger sister, Margaret, also became a teacher. She studied at Oxford University before they allowed women to take degrees. Once women were allowed to take degrees, she returned to study Latin for a year, as this was a requirement for graduation. Margaret had wanted to study science, but she was considered too frail to do the lab work required. Instead, she taught English literature and foreign languages at St. Mary’s Calne, a girls’ private boarding school.

 

David’s father Robert attended King Edward VI School in Norwich. In 1912 he went as a scholar to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1914 he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences. He joined the Royal Engineers as a signaller. After a couple of years, in 1917 he went to the Salonika Front, from which by his account he was lucky to have come home alive. He became a lifelong pacifist but it did not stop him joining the home guard to defend his own town, Cambridge, during the Second World War.

 

After the First World War, Robert returned to Cambridge and did a PhD in psychology. He then became a lecturer at Manchester University before moving to Scotland to start the Psychology Department at the University of Glasgow. While at Glasgow, he did his most important work on how an object is perceived, introducing the term “phenomenal regression” in 1931. In the 1930s this was a very unfashionable line of research, and it did not enter mainstream psychology until the 1950s. Robert was offered the resources to study this phenomenon in Australia after he had retired, but he replied that he did not have the strength and brain power he had had when he wanted to study the topic 40 years earlier. David has followed his father’s originality of thought, which sometimes came before the rest of the world is ready to engage in a topic.

 

Robert Thouless was also known for his radio programmes on how to critically analyse flaws in reasoning and arguments, which he later turned into the book Straight and Crooked Thinking. This is known as How to Think Straight in the US. It has been a required textbook for many generations of students of rhetoric. His grandson Christopher Thouless has revised the last two editions, so it has been in print for over 85 years.

 

Later in life, Robert concentrated his research efforts on studies of the paranormal. He was elected President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1942. Although a frequent result of his painstaking investigations was the detection of cheating in apparent cases of psychic powers, he continued to believe in the possible existence of such abilities.

 

David’s Education with Emphasis on Mathematics

Even as a four year old, David was precocious in mathematics. One day, after discussing with his father how far counting goes, David decided to take the experimental approach. His family was bored by the time he reached 500 and even more bored by the time he reached the second thousand.

 

Just before his fifth birthday David and his sister were evacuated to his grandmother’s house in Devon at the outbreak of the Second World War. While there, David taught himself to read and write, with the help of his grandmother’s housekeeper.

 

As soon as it appeared that a German invasion would not happen immediately, David and Susan returned to Cambridge and David started school. At this point David stopped asking how to spell words and started thinking about arithmetic. With the aid of a simple abacus he worked out problems for himself. He worked out the 2 times table, working out what 2 times 27 was before he got bored with the project. At age 7 he set himself the task of working out how many seconds there are in a year. From age seven through eight, he spent two years as the only boy in the top class of the school, with the rest of the class being large 9- to 11-year-old girls, which was not a situation he enjoyed at that age. Much to his relief, his next school St. Faith’s was a boys’ prep school.

 

 

Figure 1. David Thouless, three years old.

 

 

David’s father had a big influence on his intellectual development. “When I was 5 my father taught me to play chess, at which I slowly acquired competence but not brilliance. I think I was a teenager before I had a good chance of beating him at chess, but I was generally much better than my friends.” In fact David continued to play chess until he was in graduate school, when he felt the mental effort was too similar to physics. He and his friend played chess in their heads on long Territorial Army marches.

 

My formal education in science was close to non-existent until I was nearly fourteen. I can remember one young man trying to teach chemistry. Half the boys knew what he was talking about, but I had no idea why a chemical should go in one particular direction, rather than to any other end-product that had the same number of each atomic species. Fortunately my father was always willing and able to fill such gaps in my understanding.

 

I cannot enumerate all the things I learned from my father. He certainly told me about Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which was very unfashionable at that time. His enthusiasm for probabilistic reasoning was something he shared with me quite early; he was an early follower of Cyril Burt in stressing the importance of careful statistical analysis of psychological tests. He showed me how base 2 arithmetic could be used to win the game of Nim. I saw, but never really absorbed, the Boolean notation he used to solve problems in logic.

 

David met interesting visitors his father invited to the house. “A frequent visitor to the house in the early years of the war was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. My father had been to his lectures before the war, and there was an annotated copy of the Blue Book among his papers when my father died. I also found notes on a series of conversations on philosophical and scientific matters between Wittgenstein, my father and Cyril Waddington. These were published in 2003 by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann in the book Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions.”

 

Winchester

St Faith’s School in Cambridge encouraged David to compete for a scholarship to Winchester College. He was not sure he wanted to go, so his parents made alternative arrangements in case it should prove too stressful for him. He won the top scholarship of the year with an outstanding mathematics result and very good English and Latin. David had not studied Greek, so he did not attempt that paper. He was the first ever student to come top in the scholarship exam having only done three out of the four papers.

 

It was also decided that I should take the School Certificate at the end of the first year, despite the fact that I would still be thirteen, because in preparation for the introduction of O-levels in 1950, there would be a minimum age for School Certificate in 1949.

 

As a result of this I took the exams in English Language, English Literature, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, History (Ancient Greece), Latin, Greek and Divinity (including St. Luke in Greek). I was still struggling with Greek, quite enjoying the struggle, and got Credit in Greek, but got Very Good in all the other subjects. I had no official science background, nor any modern foreign language qualification. I did not take any serious external examination in foreign languages until I entered the Cornell Graduate School on my 22nd birthday.

 

 

Figure 2. Left to right, Ronald Peierls, Marvin Litvak and David Thouless, Cornell graduate students, 1958.

 

 

David got an excellent education in science at Winchester. “In all subjects there was a lot of emphasis on private study and assignments, and we spent relatively little time in class, perhaps less than eighteen hours a week, over about 36 weeks a year.” Time was found for a broad rounded education in addition to science. For example, “One of the joys of my second year was that the formmaster was Harold Walker, the head of the history department. His one-term course on American history left enough in my memory that I found no need to revise when I took the test for US citizenship. His scholarly but sceptical teaching of divinity was challenging and refreshing, particularly to someone like me who took religion rather too seriously.”

 

During David’s time at Winchester his termly reports did comment on his mathematical ability but expended far more space on his untidy work and handwriting. This may have led to his excellent habit of developing his equations on scrap paper and when he was satisfied with them copying them into hard backed numbered page note books. These have now been deposited in the archives of the Royal Society.

 

Cambridge University

David was fortunate that he did not get the scholarship he wanted to Trinity College, but did get one to Trinity Hall next door. Trinity Hall was a much smaller college, better suited to his introverted personality. He made a number of really good friends while there, some of whom he sees to this day. He became an honorary fellow of Trinity Hall in 2014 and enjoys participating in some of their activities.

 

Describing his undergraduate experience, he said:

 

I knew the Senior Tutor Charles Crawley well, as his son John was and is a good friend of mine. My own Tutor was the distinguished historian and theologian Owen Chadwick, and the other Tutor was Shaun Wylie, who supervised me in mathematics, and was probably the single most important influence on my academic development as an undergraduate. None of us were supposed to know the significance of Bletchley during the war and of Cheltenham later, but somehow or other, from various different sources, I had picked up a fair idea of what Shaun and his colleagues had been up to in those places.

 

 

Figure 3. Hans Bethe and David Thouless on a picnic, May 1958.

 

 

The other piece of good fortune was that Trinity Hall did allow David to defer military service until after he graduated, which Trinity College would not have done. This led into his later studies with Hans Bethe (Nobel Laureate, 1967). In June 1955, the Cavendish Professor Mott (later Sir Nevill) called David into his office and asked him what he was doing next. David said that he was going to do his military service, as he did not wish to defer until after graduate school because he did not want to do military research, which would have been the likely outcome once he had a graduate degree. Mott told him that he could continue to get a deferral as long as he continued his scientific work and that the requirement for compulsory military service was likely to be discontinued. This led to an interesting situation in which no one had time to take David on as a doctoral student but the Cavendish had money for a stipend for him. Professor Mott suggested that he work with Hans Bethe, who was on sabbatical at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University. After a year, Hans offered David the opportunity to go to Ithaca with him and study for a Cornell PhD, which David accepted.

 

 

  

  

 For the full details, please refer to the source.

  

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Source: 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/thouless/biographical/