Leon Cooper

Leon Niels Cooper (born February 28, 1930) is an American physicist and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics, along with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, for his role in developing the BCS theory (named for their initials) of superconductivity. The concept of Cooper electron pairs was named after him. He is a professor at Brown University.

A graduate of Bronx High School of Science '47 and Columbia University, Professor Cooper also received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. 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 in 1958. A fellow of the American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Natural Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, associate, Neurosciences Research Program, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1959 to 1966 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1965-66. He has carried out research at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. He 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).

Middle name

Dr. Cooper’s name has been an interesting source of confusion in the media. Many printed material, including the Nobel Prize website, refer to him 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. According to his family, the "N" does indeed stand for a name, that name being Nathan.

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Middle name

External links