The Fritz London Memorial Lectures have brought to the scientific community a distinguished group of lecturers including twenty Nobel laureates. The scientific interests of each lecturer impinge at one or more points upon the various fields of physics and chemistry to which Fritz London contributed. Past lecturers were Lothar W. Nordheim (1956), James Franck (1957), H.B.G. Casimir (1958), Felix Bloch (1959), Cornelius G. Gorter (1960), Linus C. Pauling (1962), Peter J.W. Debye (1963), John Bardeen (1964), William M. Fairbank (1965), Chen Ning Yang (1966), Walter Thirring (1968), Eugene P. Wigner (1969), Lars Onsager (1971), Jesse W. Beams (1972), David Pines (1973), J. Robert Schrieffer (1974), Michael Fisher (1975), Hans Bethe (1976), Victor Weisskopf (1977), Philip W. Anderson (1978), Edward Teller (1981), Murray Gell-Mann (1982), John C. Wheatley (1984), John A. Wheeler (1984), Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1985), Richard N. Zare (1986), Benjamin Widom (1987), K. Alex Mueller (1988), William Klemperer (1989), Freeman Dyson (1990), Rudolph Marcus (1991), Heinrich Rohrer (1992), John C. Polanyi (1993), Guenter Ahlers (1994), Walter Kohn (1995), Russell Donnelly (1996), Robert C. Richardson (1998), Ahmed H. Zewail (1999). Wolfgang Ketterle (2000), Richard Smalley (2001), Harry Swinney (2002), Harry Gray(2003), Myriam Sarachik (2004), Charles M. Lieber (2005), Frank Wilcek (2006), John Hopfield (2007), Jerry P. Gollub (2008) and William H. Miller (2009)
In December 1972, John Bardeen, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, established an endowment fund at Duke University "to perpetuate the memory of Fritz London, distinguished scientist and member of the Duke faculty from 1939 to the time of his death in 1954, and to promote research and understanding of Physics at Duke University and in the wider scientific community". Specifically the fund is to be used to (1) underwrite the Fritz London Memorial Prize, given in recognition of outstanding contributions in Low Temperature Physics and (2) provide support for the London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.