Professor James P. Elliott (known as Phil), Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics, died suddenly on Tuesday 21 October at his home in Lewes, aged 79.
Phil was one of the early appointments in Physics at Sussex, joining as a Senior Lecturer in 1962 after work at Harwell, Rochester and Southampton and gaining promotion to reader and then professor.
Among other duties, he was Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MAPS) from 1979-84.
He was a pioneer in introducing symmetry methods into nuclear physics, gaining an early international reputation for a series of seminal papers in the late 1950s. He was also an excellent teacher, and wrote (with the late Peter Dawber) an influential textbook, Symmetry in Physics, first published in 1979 and still in print.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1980 and was awarded both the Rutherford Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1994 and the Lise Meitner Prize of the European Physical Society in 2002 (jointly with Francesco Iachello of Yale) "for their innovative applications of group theoretical methods to the understanding of atomic nuclei".
Although he retired in 1994, Phil remained active in research and had been working with one of his collaborators on the day he died.
A thanksgiving for his life will be held at 2pm on Friday 7 November at Christ Church, Lewes. Further details will be posted on the Sussex physics website