Leon Cooper

Leon Cooper, born in New York in 1930, won the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics along with John Bardeen and Robert Schrieffer, for developing the theory of superconductivity called the BCS theory (for Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer). Discovered in 1911, superconductivity is a state that occurs in very cold metals when electricity travels with no resistance -- the attempt to understand superconductivity was one of the early drives in low-temperature physics.

Cooper grew up in New York and attended Columbia University for both his undergraduate and graduate degree in physics. He worked at several universities in his 20s including the University of Illinois with Bardeen and Schrieffer from 1955 to 1957, which is when the three studied superconductivity. In 1958 he took a post at Brown University where he has been ever since. In 1973 he became the director of Brown’s Center for Neural Science – a cross-disciplinary center drawing on applied mathematics, biomedical sciences, linguistics, and physics in an effort to understand memory and other brain functions.