Bertrand I. Halperin is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University.

He grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He attended Harvard University (class of 1961), and did his graduate work at Berkeley with John J. Hopfield (PhD 1965). In the 1970s, he, together with David R. Nelson, worked out a theory of two-dimensional melting, predicting the hexatic phase before it was experimentally observed by Pindak et al. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the theory of the Integral and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. His recent interests lie in the area of strongly interacting low dimensional electron systems. In 2001, he was awarded the Lars Onsager Prize. In 2003, he and Anthony J. Leggett were awarded the Wolf Prize in physics.