Harry Rosenberg was the son of a small shopkeeper in East Ham, then in Essex, now part of the London Borough of Newham.
He volunteered and served throughout the war in the RAF working with radio equipment, which he had studied in his spare time.
He graduated with a first class honours degree in physics from UCL, and then obtained a DPhil in 1953 from the University of Oxford under Kurt Mendelssohn.
On his 60th birthday, in 1982, Rosenberg was gloomily contemplating the need to find a new topic of research to last until his retirement, when a note from an old colleague, Ray Orbach in California, showed that his experimental results on the low temperature properties of amorphous solids found a natural explanation in terms of the newly discovered mathematical theory of fractals, by now of course familiar through the strange and beautiful pictures that they generate.
Rosenberg was regarded as a gifted lecturer, not only to undergraduates and to colleagues at conferences, but also to a much wider audience, both on the radio and on television.