John Ziman (born 16.05.1925) was an English theoretical physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society (1967). He was born in Cambridge. He graduated in 1947 from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and in 1952 received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he worked in 1951-54; in 1954-64 he worked at Cambridge. From 1964 he was professor and from 1976 director of the physics laboratory of the University of Bristol.
His research concerned the quantum theory of the solid state, magnetism and the description of the electron states of metals, in particular the foundations of band theory, the group-theoretical analysis of phenomena in the phonon spectrum of crystals, and the dispersion curves of ferromagnons obtained by inelastic neutron scattering. In 1961—65 he developed the quantum theory of liquid metals (the Ziman theory). He contributed to the creation of the theory of disordered systems.
Editor of the journal “Science Progress” (from 1964) and of the Cambridge Monographs on Physics.