Professor James Binney

FRS
Emeritus Fellow, Non-stipendiary Lecturer in Physics
Research

Although I was retired in March 2018 I am still research active, and hold grants from the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust. I work on the structure and formation of galaxies, and lately the focus has been on our own Galaxy. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000 and served as Head of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics for five years from 2010. I have received prizes and medals in London, Paris, Rome and Cornell.

Teaching

For 26 years prior to 2007 I was a Tutorial Fellow and have taught a substantial fraction of the undergraduate syllabus. With former Merton undergraduates I've written textbooks on the critical phenomena and quantum mechanics. I currently do tutorials and classes in fluids, quantum mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, and I give a class annually on functions of a complex variable.