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Bertrand I. Halperin is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.
Professor Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood. His mother was Eva Teplitzky Halperin and his father Morris Halperin.. His mother was a college administrator and his father a customs inspector. Both his parents were born in Ukraine. His paternal grandmother's family the Maximovs claimed descent from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the BESHT.
He attended Harvard University, and did his graduate work at Berkeley with John J. Hopfield. In the 1970s, he, together with David R. Nelson, worked out a theory of two-dimensional melting, predicting the hexatic phase before it was experimentally observed by Pindak et al. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the theory of the Integral and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. His recent interests lie in the area of strongly interacting low dimensional electron systems. In 2001, he was awarded the Lars Onsager Prize. In 2003, he and Anthony J. Leggett were awarded the Wolf Prize in physics.
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