Kenneth James Le Couteur (16 September 1920 – 18 April 2011) was a British physicist who was the foundation Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

He was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941, winning the Mayhew Prize for the student showing the greatest distinction in applied mathematics.

[1][2] After the war ended in 1945, Le Couteur returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of St John's College, where he worked on his doctorate.

His academic supervisor initially was Maurice Pryce, but he became the Wykeham Professor of Physics at Oxford University in 1946, and Nicholas Kemmer took over.

Le Couteur was awarded a Turner and Newall Fellowship to study at the University of Manchester, where he completed his doctorate in 1948–49 under the supervision of Léon Rosenfeld.

[1] In 1956, Mark Oliphant recruited Le Couteur as the foundation Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

[1] In 1962 Le Couteur arranged for the department to acquire an IBM 1620 as its first computer; it was programmed for numerical calculations in the FORTRAN language.