Jan Myrheim (born 14 February 1948) is a Norwegian physicist. He was born in

Røyrvik Røyrvik ( sma, Raarvihke, sv, Röyrvik) is a municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. It is part of the Namdalen region. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Røyrvik. The area has always had a strong Sami influe ...

. He took the cand.real. at the

University of Oslo The University of Oslo ( no, Universitetet i Oslo; la, Universitas Osloensis) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the highest ranked and oldest university in Norway. It is consistently ranked among the top univers ...

in 1972 and took the

dr.philos. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

degree at the

University of Trondheim A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', whic ...

in 1994. He was then appointed as a professor of

theoretical physics Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

at the

Norwegian University of Science and Technology Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including th ...

. He had then worked at the

Norwegian Institute of Technology The Norwegian Institute of Technology (Norwegian: ''Norges tekniske høgskole'', NTH) was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 58 years, after which it was m ...

since 1985, except the years 1987 to 1990. Together with Jon Magne Leinaas he discovered that in one and two spatial dimensions, there is a possibility of having fractional quantum statistics. This is of particular importance in two dimensions where fractional statistics particles, usually referred to as

anyon In physics, an anyon is a type of quasiparticle that occurs only in two-dimensional systems, with properties much less restricted than the two kinds of standard elementary particles, fermions and bosons. In general, the operation of exchan ...

s, play an important role in the theory of the

fractional quantum Hall effect The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a physical phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2-dimensional (2D) electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at fractional values of e^2/h. It is a property of a collective state in which elec ...

. The duo shared the Fridtjof Nansen Excellent Research Award in Science in 1993.

References

1948 births Living people People from Røyrvik University of Oslo alumni Norwegian Institute of Technology faculty Norwegian University of Science and Technology faculty Norwegian physicists Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters {{Norway-academic-bio-stub