David Sherrington (physicist)
David Sherrington is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. He is known for his work in condensed matter and statistical physics, and particularly for the invention of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, an exactly solvable mean-field model of a spin glass.
Career
David Sherrington was born in Blackpool, England in 1941 and grew up in Yorkshire. He received an undergraduate degree in physics in 1962 and a PhD in theoretical physics in 1966, both from the University of Manchester. After a brief period as a lecturer at Manchester, he took a position at Imperial College London as a lecturer in physics, rising subsequently to the rank of reader and later professor. In 1989 he moved to Oxford University as a Fellow of New College and to Oxford's Department of Theoretical Physics as the sixth Wykeham Professor of Physics and head of the department. He retired as head of the department in 2004 and from the professorship in 2008. Sherrington has been Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Advances in Physics since 1984, and was a founding editor of Communications on Physics as well as editor of the Oxford Monographs in Physics book series starting in 1995.Among other honours, Sherrington is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the European Academy of Sciences. He was recipient of the Bakerian Medal of the Royal Society in 2001, the Dirac Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics in 2007 and the Blaise Pascal Medal from the European Academy in 2010.