John Robert Schrieffer Biography

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

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

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.

John Robert Schrieffer 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.

During 1957-58, John Robert Schrieffer remained a ‘National Science Foundation’ fellow at the ‘University of Birmingham’ in England. In 1958, he remained a scholar at the ‘Niels Bohr Institute’, ‘University of Copenhagen’, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He extended his research work on superconductivity at both these places.

In 1958, he joined ‘University of Chicago’ as an assistant professor.

In 1959, he returned to Illinois to work as a faculty member at the ‘University of Illinois’.

In 1962, he joined the faculty at the ‘University of Pennsylvania’. He was named Mary Amanda Wood Professor in Physics there in 1964. That year his book on BCS theory titled ‘Theory of Superconductivity’ was published.

From 1969 to 1975, Schrieffer remained Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at the ‘Cornell University’.

He was inducted as an eminent scholar professor by the ‘Florida State University’ in 1992. The university also made him the Chief Scientist of its ‘National High Magnetic Field Laboratory’, which conducts magnetic field research in physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, geochemistry and bioengineering. It is the only such research lab in the US.

He retired in 2006, and concentrated on the field of high temperature superconductivity, highly correlated electrons and dynamics of electrons in powerful magnetic fields.

John Robert Schrieffer was a member of many prestigious scientific academies, including ‘American Academy of Arts and Sciences’, ‘American Philosophical Society’, ‘National Academy of Sciences’, ‘Royal Danish Academy of Sciences’ and Russian ‘Academy of Sciences’.

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

John Robert Schrieffer married Anne Grete Thomsen in 1960. They had 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.

John Robert Schrieffer died on July 27, 2019, in his sleep at a nursing facility in Florida. He was 88.