What sets John Bardeen apart from the rest of the Nobel Prize winners?

10/11/2016 Rebecca Nash, ECE ILLINOIS

FiveThirtyEight recently highlighted Bardeen, noting that while he might fit the typical image of a Nobel Prize physicist, he is set apart from many of the winners for two important reasons.

Written by Rebecca Nash, ECE ILLINOIS

ECE researcher John Bardeen was a two-time Nobel Prize winner, who also established major research programs in the Physics Department at Illinois. He was first awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for the invention of the transistor and then again in 1972 for his development of the theory of how superconductivity operates on a microscopic level. Of the other 200 Nobel Prize winners in physics, he is the only one to have ever captured the award twice.

When someone thinks of a physics Nobel Prize winner, Bardeen may fit the typical image. He is an older male, which is not surprising since only two women have ever won this award since its advent in 1901. He also wore glasses, was slightly balding, enjoyed to golf in his free time, and graduated highschool by the age of 15. It is not out of the ordinary that Bardeen was American, since the U.S. leads the world in Physics Nobel Prize winners with more than double the winners of the next leading country, Germany. 

However, there is one aspect about Bardeen that set him apart from the typical Nobel Prize physicist. He is only the second Physics Nobel Prize winner from a public university, compared to private institutions such as Standford with ten wins, Harvard with nine, and MIT, the University of Cambridge, and Caltech each with seven. Bardeen's legacy lives on today at Illinois with the John Bardeen Award for students enrolled in the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

John Bardeen's accomplishments are remembered in an article by FiveThirtyEight.


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This story was published October 11, 2016.