John Bardeen (May 23 1908 – January 30 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Physics: in 1956 for the transistor, along with William Shockley and Walter Brattain, and in 1972 for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity together with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, called BCS theory. He became the first person to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in the same field.

The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronical device, from telephones to computers to missiles. His developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in medical advances such as CAT scans and MRI.

In 1990, Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine 's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908. He was the second son of Dr. Charles R. Bardeen and Althea Harmer Bardeen. He was one of five children. His father, Charles Bardeen was Professor of Anatomy and the first Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Althea, before marrying, had taught at the Dewey Laboratory School and run an interior decorating business; after marriage she was an active figure in the art world.

Bardeen's talent for mathematics was recognized early. His seventh grade mathematics teacher encouraged Bardeen in pursuing advanced work, and years later, Bardeen credited him for "first exciting [his] interest in mathematics."

Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, even though he could have graduated several years earlier. His graduation was postponed due to taking additional courses at another high school and also partly because of his mother's death. He entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1923. While in college he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He raised the needed membership fees partly by playing billiards. He was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.

Bardeen received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had taken all the graduate courses in physics and mathematics that had interested him, and in fact, graduated in five years, one more than usual; this allowed him time to also complete a Master's thesis, supervised by Leo J. Peters. He received his M.S. in electrical engineering in 1929 from Wisconsin. His mentors in mathematics were Warren Weaver and Edward Van Vleck. His primary physics mentor was John Hasbrouck van Vleck, but he was also much influenced by visiting scholars such as Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld.

Bardeen stayed on for some time at Wisconsin furthering his studies, but he eventually went to work for three years at Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Company, based in Pittsburgh. After the work failed to keep his interest, he applied and was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University.

Bardeen studied both mathematics and physics as a graduate student, ending up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics, under Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner. Before completing his thesis, he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935. He spent there the next three years, from 1935 to 1938, working with Nobel laureate physicist John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1936.

In the fall of 1938, Bardeen started in his new role as assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

In 1941, the world was embroiled in war, and Bardeen was convinced by his colleagues to take a leave of absence and work for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. He would stay there for four years. In 1943 he was invited to join the Manhattan Project, but he refused, since he did not want to uproot his family. He received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award for his service at the NOL.

After the end of World War II, Bardeen started seeking a return to academia, but the University of Minnesota did not realize the importance of the young field of solid-state physics. They offered him only a small raise. Bardeen's expertise in solid-state physics made him invaluable to Bell Labs, which was just starting a solid-state division. Remembering the lack of support he had received previously from the university to pursue his research, he decided to take a lucrative offer from Bell Labs in 1945.

In October 1945, John Bardeen began work at Bell Labs. He moved his family to Summit, New Jersey. John Bardeen had met William Shockley when they were both in school in Massachusetts. He rekindled his friendship with Walter Brattain. Bardeen knew Walter Brattain from his graduate school days at Princeton. He had previously met Brattain through Brattain's brother, Bob Brattain. Bob Brattain was also a Princeton graduate student. On December 23, 1947, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (Bardeen's manager at the time) unveiled the transistor.

The "transistor" (a combination of "transfer" and "resistor") was 50 times smaller than the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios and allowed electrical devices to become more compact. Shockley took the lion's share of the credit in public for the discovery, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley.

Bardeen left Bell Labs and joined the engineering faculty and the physics faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1951. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University. His first Ph.D. student was Nick Holonyak (1954), the inventor of the first LED in 1962.

At Illinois, he established two major research programs, one in the Electrical Engineering Department and one in the Physics Department. The research program in the Electrical Engineering Department dealt with both experimental and theoretical aspects of semiconductors, and the research program in the Physics Department dealt with theoretical aspects of macroscopic quantum systems, particularly superconductivity and quantum liquids.

He was an active professor at Illinois from 1951 to 1975 and then became Professor Emeritus.

In 1956 John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

Bardeen worked together with Leon Cooper and Bardeen's doctoral student Robert Schrieffer to create the standard theory of superconductivity -- the "BCS theory," named after them. For this work they were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1972. This was Bardeen's second Nobel, a distinction shared only with Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger. Bardeen gave much of his Nobel Prize money to fund the Fritz London Memorial Lectures at Duke University. At the time of his award, he was the first Nobelist to win twice in the same field.

Bardeen also received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1971 for "his profound contributions to the understanding of the conductivity of solids, to the invention of the transistor, and to the microscopic theory of superconductivity."

Bardeen was one of 11 recipients given the Third Century Award from President George H.W. Bush in 1990 for "exceptional contributions to American society" and was granted a gold medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988.

Bardeen was also an important advisor to Xerox Corporation. Though quiet by nature, he took the uncharacteristic step of urging Xerox executives to keep their California research center, Xerox PARC, afloat when the parent company was suspicious that its research center would amount to little.

Bardeen died of cardiac arrest at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts on January 30, 1991. While he lived in Champaign-Urbana, he was in Boston for medical consultation.

Bardeen and his wife Jane had three children, James and William Bardeen and Elizabeth Greytak, and six grandchildren when he died.

Bardeen married Jane Maxwell on July 18, 1938. While at Princeton, he met Jane during a visit to his old friends in Pittsburgh.

Bardeen was a man with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for throwing cookouts where he would cook for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university. He enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family.

It has been said that Bardeen proves wrong the stereotype of the "crazy scientist." Lillian Hoddeson, a University of Illinois historian who wrote a book on Bardeen, said that because he "differed radically from the popular stereotype of genius and was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary, the public and the media often overlooked him."

In honor of Professor Bardeen, the engineering quadrangle at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is named the Bardeen Quad.

Also in honor of Bardeen, Sony Corporation endowed a $53 million John Bardeen professorial chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, beginning in 1990. The current John Bardeen Professor is Nick Holonyak, Bardeen's first doctoral student and protege.

At the time of Bardeen's death, then-University of Illinois chancellor Morton Weir said, "It is a rare person whose work changes the life of every American; John's did."

* Hoddeson, Lillian and Vicki Daitch. True Genius: the Life and Science of John Bardeen. National Academy Press, 2002. (ISBN 0-309-08408-3)

* The Bardeen Archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign * Biography from PBS * Biography from the Nobel Foundation * Biography from Nobel-Winners.com * IEEE History Center biography * IEEE 2nd Int. Conference on Computers, Communications and Control (ICCCC 2008), an event dedicated to the Centenary of John Bardeen (1908-1991) * Associated Press Obituary of John Bardeen as printed in The Boston Globe