Why was John Bardeen Important?:
John Bardeen Education:
John Bardeen Main Awards:
- 1956 Nobel Prize Physics (Co-winners William Shockley, Walter Brattain) for the invention of the transistor
- 1972 Nobel Prize Physics (co-winners Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer) for theory of conventional superconductivity aka BCS theory
- 1971 IEEE Medal of Honor
- 1974 Induction National Inventors Hall of Fame
- 1990 LIFE Magazine's list of 100 Most Influential Americans of the Century
John Bardeen Biography: May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991:
In 1945, John Bardeen began working at Bell Labs, as a member of a Solid State Physics Group. John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, were researching the behavior of crystals as semi-conductors in an attempt to replace vacuum tubes as mechanical relays in telecommunications. The team's research lead to the 1947 invention of the "point-contact" transistor amplifier, and receiving the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1951 after leaving Bell Labs, John Bardeen became Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 1957, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, proposed the standard theory of superconductivity known as the BCS theory. Their model suggested that electrons in a superconductor condense into a quantum ground state and travel together collectively and coherently. In 1972, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory of superconductivity.
In 1991, John Bardeen died of cardiac arrest.
