Leon Nathan 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, work he did in his 20s. The concept of Cooper electron pairs was named after him. He is a professor at
Brown University.
Cooper graduated from the
Bronx High School of Science in 1947 and received a
B.A. in 1951,
M.A. in 1953, and
Ph.D. in 1954 from
Columbia University. 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. He is the
Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the
Institute for Brain and Neural Systems.
A fellow of the
American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the
National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society,American Association for the Advancement of Science, 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.
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Dr. Cooper has received the
Comstock Prize (with Dr. Schrieffer) of the National Academy of Sciences; the Award of Excellence, Graduate Faculties Alumni of
Columbia University and
Descartes Medal, Academie de Paris, Université Rene Descartes and the
John Jay Award of Columbia College. He also has been awarded seven honorary doctorates.
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).
