Ian C. Percival


Ian Colin Percival is a British theoretical physicist. He is the Emeritus Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.
He is one among the pioneers of quantum chaos and he is well known for his suggestion in the 1970s about the existence of a different type of spectra of quantum-mechanical systems due to classical chaos. Numerical explorations performed by other researchers clearly confirmed this idea later. In 1987, he came up with Franco Vivaldi algebraic number theory of quadratic number fields on the counting of periodic orbits in discrete chaotic dynamical systems. Later on, he worked on the basics of quantum mechanics and the measurement process.
Together with Walter Strunz he suggested the properties of the quantum foam at the Planck scale, in the wave function of an atom-beam interference.

Awards

In 1985 he was awarded the Naylor Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize, this is awarded annually by the Institute of Physics.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Books and articles