Sir Roger James Elliott. 8 December 1928—16 April 2018

Abstract

Roger James Elliott was a theoretical physicist and pioneer in the use of quantum theory in solid state physics, which happened a few years after the invention of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s and which spread into all areas of solid state physics during the years when Roger Elliott was active (roughly the second half of the twentieth century, 1950–2000). He specialized in the magnetic, semiconductor and optical properties of condensed matter, with a particular emphasis on the effects caused by disorder—that is, the absence of periodicity in alloys and amorphous materials. He studied at New College, Oxford, before working as a postdoc at Berkeley. He then returned to England, first to Harwell and then to a faculty position at the University of Reading. During this time he completed his seminal work on the general theory of the optical properties of excitons. He returned to Oxford in 1957, where he was to stay for the remaining 60 years, until his death in 2018. He was the Wykeham professor of physics from 1974 until 1988, and he was awarded the Maxwell Medal in 1968 and the Guthrie Medal in 1990, both from the Institute of Physics. He was knighted in 1987. In his later years he was very active in the Royal Society as Foreign Secretary and also in scientific publishing worldwide after he served as chief executive of Oxford University Press from 1988 until 1993.