John Bardeen

John Bardeen was born on 23 May 1908 in Madison, Wisconsin, and died on 30 January 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936, then worked at the University of Minnesota and, during the Second World War, as a principal physicist at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory. He joined Bell Labs in 1945 as a theorist in a solid-state physics group led by William Shockley, and on 16 December 1947, working with the experimentalist Walter Brattain, demonstrated the first working point-contact transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with Shockley and Brattain for that work. Bardeen left Bell Labs in 1951, in part over friction with Shockley about credit for the invention, and joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer he developed the BCS theory of superconductivity, published in 1957. For it he was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972, the only person to date to win the Physics prize twice.