Leon Cooper

Leon N Cooper

Cooper in 2007
Born (1930-02-28) February 28, 1930
Bronx, New York, United States
Residence United States
Nationality American
Fields Physics
Institutions Brown University
Alma mater Columbia University
Doctoral advisor Robert Serber
Doctoral students Elie Bienenstock
Paul Munro
Nathan Intrator
Omer Artun
Michael Perrone
Alan Saul
Known for Superconductivity
Cooper pairs
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1972)
Comstock Prize in Physics (1968)

Leon N Cooper[1] (born February 28, 1930) is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, who with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity.[2][3] He is also the namesake of the Cooper pair and co-developer of the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.[4]

Biography and career

Cooper graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1947[5][6] and received a B.A. in 1951,[7] M.A. in 1953,[7] and Ph.D. in 1954 from Columbia University.[7][8] He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and taught at the University of Illinois and Ohio State University before coming to Brown University in 1958.[8] He is the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems.

He has carried out research at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The character Sheldon Cooper, featured in the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named in part after Leon Cooper.[9]

Memberships and honors

Publications

Cooper is the author of Science and Human Experience - a collection of essays, including previously unpublished material, on issues such as consciousness and the structure of space. (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Cooper is the author of an unconventional liberal-arts physics textbook, originally An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (Harper and Row, 1968) and still in print in a somewhat condensed form as Physics: Structure and Meaning (Lebanon: New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1992).

References

  1. Many printed materials, including the Nobel Prize website, have referred to Cooper as “Leon Neil Cooper”. However, the middle initial N does not stand for Neil, or for any other name. The correct form of the name is, thus, “Leon N Cooper”, with no abbreviation dots (an earlier source http://revista.cecm.usp.br/arquivo/2006jan/entrevista/cooper is no longer available)
  2. "Superconductivity". CERN official website. CERN.
  3. Weinberg, Steven (February 2008). "From BSC to the LHC". CERN Courier. 48 (1): 17–21.
  4. Bienenstock, Elie (1982). "Theory for the development of neuron selectivity: orientation specificity and binocular interaction in visual cortex". The Journal of Neuroscience. 2 (1): 32–48.
  5. "Bronx Science Honored as Historic Physics Site by the American Physical Society". bxscience.edu. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  6. MacDonald, Kerri (15 October 2010). "A Nobel Laureate Returns Home to Bronx Science". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Leon Cooper". research.brown.edu. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  8. 1 2 Vanderkam, Laura (15 July 2008). "From Biology to Physics and Back Again: Leon Cooper". Scientific American. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  9. The Big Bang Theory, la fórmula perfecta del humor
  10. "Comstock Prize in Physics". National Academy of Sciences.

External links

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