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.
Read more about this topic: Anthony James Leggett
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)