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John Bardeen Facts

John Bardeen Facts
John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 to January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer and was the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor and in 1972 he, Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer shared the Nobel for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
Interesting John Bardeen Facts:
John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin and after graduating from Madison Central High School in 1923 he entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1928 and his M.S. in the same field in 1929.
From 1930 to 1933 he worked at the Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh where his project was on the methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys.
In 1933 he was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University.
In 1936 he received a PhD in mathematical physics and from 1935 to 1938 he was a junior Fellow at Harvard University where he worked with Nobel laureate, John Van Vleck on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals.
In 1945 he went to work for Bell Labs in the Solid State Physics Group.
Their project was to find an alternative to glass vacuum tube amplifiers and Bardeen's theory on surface states was the key to making the project successful.
On December 23, 1947 Bardeen and Walter Brattain successfully created a point-contact transistor.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry and was critical to the development of many devices including personal computers and cell phones.
In 1951 he accepted a position as Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois--Urbana.
In 1957 he, Leon Cooper and doctoral student, John Robert Schrieffer proposed the theory of superconductivity that is the standard in the field and formed the basis for the development of magnetic resonance imaging.
He created research projects on the experimental and theoretical aspects of semiconductors and the theoretical aspects of macroscopic quantum systems.
His first PhD student, Nick Holonyak invented the LED in 1962.
Bardeen continued his research on the flow of electrons in charge density waves through metallic linear chain compounds and, in 2012 his findings were confirmed.
In addition to his two Nobel Prizes, Bardeen received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1952, the National medal of Science in 1965, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1971 and in 1977 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.


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