[4][5][6] Haldane was educated at St Paul's School, London[2] and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a PhD in 1978[7] for research supervised by Philip Warren Anderson.

[11][12] As of 2011[update] he is developing a new geometric description of the fractional quantum Hall effect that introduces the "shape" of the "composite boson", described by a "unimodular" (determinant 1) spatial metric-tensor field as the fundamental collective degree of freedom of Fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) states.

[19] He was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1993); Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (1984–88); Lorentz Chair (2008), Dirac Medal (2012);[20] Doctor Honoris Causae of the Université de Cergy-Pontoise (2015);[21] Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecturer (2017); Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2017).

[23] His father was a doctor in the British Army stationed on the Yugoslavia/Austria border and there he met young medicine student Ljudmila Renko, a Slovene, and subsequently married her and moved back to England where Duncan was born.

[26] All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."