Illustration of the British-US physicist J Michael Kosterlitz (born 1943). In the 1970s Kosterlitz and his colleague David Thouless 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. Kosterlitz received a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with British physicists David Thouless and Duncan Haldane, for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. The work has applications in quantum computing and other electronics.