Illustration of the British physicist David Thouless (1934-2019). In the 1970s Thouless and his colleague Michael Kosterlitz described a phase transition in a very flat material at close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). Something that wasnt thought to occur. This type of phase transition, a topological phase transition, is known as a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and has been shown to be universal in low dimension materials. Thouless received a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with British physicists Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. The work has applications in quantum computing and other electronics.