Education
He 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).
He completed a second undergraduate degree, this time in physics at Merton College. One person who was willing to overlook his unorthodox credentials was Dirk ter Haar, then a reader in theoretical physics and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; so he signed up for research under his supervision. As with all 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 unfortunately turned out to be much less experimentally accessible than the other side of the phase diagram, dilute solutions of 3He in 4He). Oxford University awarded Leggett an Honorary DLitt in June 2005.
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