Philip Warren Anderson (born December 13, 1923) is an American physicist. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and having grown up in Urbana, Illinois, he went to Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate work, with a wartime stint at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in between. In graduate school he studied under John Hasbrouck van Vleck.
After school he joined Bell Laboratories, where he worked on a wide variety of problems in condensed matter physics. He is most well-known for discovering the concept of "localization," the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system.
In 1977 Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his investigations into the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, which allowed for the development of electronic switching and memory devices in computers. Co-researchers Sir Nevill Francis Mott and Van Vleck shared the award with him.
He retired from Bell Labs in 1984 and is currently Joseph Henry Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
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