J, Robert Schrieffer is a Nobel Prize winning pyhsicist who figured out how certain materials can convey electricity without resistance. His greatest accomplishment came as a graduate student in the 1950s, when he tackled the question of how electrical resistance disappears in certain materials known as superconductors. Superconductors are used in the magnets of most magnetic resonance imaging machines and for accelerating protons as the particle accelerators that study the smallest bits of the universe. Dr. Schrieffer was a graduate student of Dr. Bardeen¿s at the University of Illinois when he came up with a mathematical expression that described how the pairs of electrons coalesced into one large clump, allowing them to move together without scattering - that is, without generating electrical resistance. This idea became known as the "Theory of Superconductivity".
John Robert Schrieffer was born on May 31, 1931, in Oak Park, Ill., to John H. and Louise (Anderson) Schrieffer. After studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years, Dr. Schrieffer switched to physics and graduated with a bachelor¿s degree in 1953. He completed his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1957. He worked at the University of Birmingham in England, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1964.Dr. Schrieffer received the National Medal of Science in 1983. In 1996, he served a one-year term as president of the American Physical Society.
J.Robert Schrieffer passed away on July 27, 2019 in Tallahassee, Florida at the age of 88.
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