John Robert Schrieffer

He married Anne Grete Thomsen at the Christmas of 1960. They are blessed with three children - two daughters, Bolette and Regina, and a son, Paul.

On September 24, 2004, he got involved in an accident while driving from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, when his car crashed into another vehicle killing its 57 year old driver Renato Catolos and injuring seven more persons in Orcutt, California. Schrieffer’s driver licence was under suspension during that time. He was driving at a speed over 100 miles per hour when he lost control resulting into the accident.

On November 6, 2005, he was sentenced to two years of prison for vehicular manslaughter to which he pleaded no contest. He was confined in the ‘Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility’ situated at the Rock Mountain close to San Diego, California.

He was born on May 31, 1931, in Oak Park, Illinois, to John H. Schrieffer and Louise Anderson.

His family relocated to Manhasset, New York, in 1940.

In 1947 the family again shifted to Florida, where his father embarked into the citrus industry and became an orange grove owner.

Schrieffer attended the ‘Eustis High School’ in Eustis, Florida, and completed his graduation in 1949.

He then headed north to Massachusetts and enrolled at the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ (‘MIT’) to study electrical engineering. However after majoring in electrical engineering for two years, he switched to physics in the third year. In 1953 he obtained BS in Physics from the institute submitting his thesis on multiplets in heavy atoms under the guidance of distinguished American physicist John C. Slater.

His interest in solid state physics landed him at Illinois to pursue graduate studies at the ‘University of Illinois’ at Urbana-Champaign. Soon he was inducted as research assistant in the lab of John Bardeen.

While at the lab of Bardeen he initially concentrated to work on a theoretical problem regarding electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces. He then went on to apply such theory to various surface problems for about a year.

He got involved in developing the theory of superconductivity with Bardeen and Cooper in 1956, during the third year of his graduate studies. The same year Cooper, who was also working as an assistant in the lab of Bardeen, discovered that electrons, which usually behave repulsively with each other, could however be paired when temperature conditions are extremely low. This concept is known as Cooper pairs. As temperature increases well above absolute zero the Cooper pairs breaks.

Following this discovery of Cooper, Schrieffer embarked on to find a mathematical description of behaviour of the Cooper pairs. His mathematical breakthrough came in early 1957 when he succeeded in developing the essential equations. The ‘BCS’ theory was completed and announced later that year.

In 1957 he earned his PhD from the ‘University of Illinois’ at Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral thesis included his theoretical work on superconductivity.

He jointly received the ‘Nobel Prize in Physics’ in 1972 with noted physicists, John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper.