Professor Sir Michael Berry, FRS
Department of Physics
University of Bristol

Professor Sir Michael Berry received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of St Andrews in 1965. Since then he has been at the Department of Physics at the University of Bristol, where he is now the Melville Wills Professor of Physics. Among many other awards and honours he was elected to the Royal Society in 1982, made Knight Bachelor Queen's Birthday Honours in 1996 and received the Polya Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2005. He was jointly awarded the Ig Nobel prize in 2000 for his work on the levitation of frogs.

Professor Berry has published over 400 articles. His research interests `lurk in the borderlands between physical theories - between classical and quantum, between rays and waves... the domain of physical asymptotics, with an emphasis on geometrical aspects of waves (especially phase) and chaos.' His recent and current research interests include the relation between Riemann zeros and energy levels of classically chaotic quantum systems, singularities of faint light (phase singularities or `optical vortices') singularities of bright light (caustics) and the related problem of tsunami focusing by a submerged island. His work on asymptotics and relations between theories, where singular limits arise when less general theories are taken as limits of more general ones, involves the study of divergent series, the Stokes phenomenon and hyperasymptotics. Research on extreme coherence has led him to the study of hypercoherent waves, generating `fantastic spirals in their complex planes'.