Merton College, Oxford

Sir Anthony James Leggett, KBE, FRS , aka Tony Leggett, has been a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1983.... Professor Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics. He was born in Camberwell, South London. His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire; his father broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; his father would relate how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at the Covent Garden market in London. His mother's parents were of Irish descent; her father had emigrated to England and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham .
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th... century." Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion , The Waste Land , The Hollow Men , Ash Wednesday , and Four Quartets . He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot , was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis.
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Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen FRS was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von... Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals. In the 1960s he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including The Riddle of the Rook and Signals for Survival , which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971. Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he is also noted as the brother of Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He had a third eminent brother, Luuk Tinbergen who committed suicide in 1955 at age 39. Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young. He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II. Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled.
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Sir Alec John Jeffreys, FRS is a British geneticist, who developed techniques for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling which are now used all over... the world in forensic science to assist police detective work, and also to resolve paternity and immigration disputes. He is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, and he became an honorary freeman of the City of Leicester on 26 November 1992. In 1994, he was knighted by her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, for Services to Science and Technology . Jeffreys was born on 9 January 1950 in Oxford. He came from a middle-class family and has one brother and sister. He spent the first six years of his life in Oxford until 1956 when the family moved to Luton. His curiosity and inventiveness were probably gained from his father, as well as his paternal grandfather who had a number of patents to his name.
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