Pryce was born in
Croydon to an Anglo-Welsh father and French mother, and in his teens attended the
Royal Grammar School, Guildford. After a few months in
Heidelberg to add German to the French that had been his first language at home, he went to
Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1935, he went to
Princeton University, supported by a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (now
Harkness Fellowship) where he worked with
Wolfgang Pauli and
John von Neumann, obtaining his Ph.D. with a thesis on
The wave mechanics of the photon under the supervision of
Max Born and
Ralph Fowler. In 1937, he returned to
England as a Fellow of Trinity, until, in 1939, he was appointed Reader in Theoretical Physics at
Liverpool University under
James Chadwick. In 1941, he joined the Admiralty Signals Establishment (now part of the
Admiralty Research Establishment) to work on radar. In 1944, he joined the British atomic energy team in
Montreal designing nuclear reactors, but, in 1945, returned to England, first to Cambridge and then, in 1946, to
Oxford, where he was appointed
Wykeham Professor of Physics. Among his
doctoral students were
Anatole Abragam and
John Clive Ward. In 1947, in collaboration with John Ward, he co-authored a paper that originated on the probability amplitude of two entangled quanta propagating in opposite directions. In 1950,
Klaus Fuchs was head of the theoretical physics group at
AERE, Harwell. When Fuchs was arrested for
supplying atomic secrets to the
USSR, Pryce served part-time as his replacement. In 1954, he moved to the
University of Bristol as Head of the Physics Department. In 1964, he returned to North America, first to the
University of Southern California and then, in 1968, to the
University of British Columbia. From 1968 to 1978, he served on the Technical Advisory Committee (for nuclear waste management) of
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. == Distinctions ==