Schrieffer, John Robert, 1931–2019, American physicist, b., Oak Park, Ill., Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois, 1957. Schrieffer was a professor at the Univ. of Chicago (1957–60), the Univ. of Illinois (1960–62), the Univ. of Pennsylvania (1962–79), the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (1980–92), where he also directed (1984–89) the Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Florida State Univ. (1992–2006), where he was the chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Laboratory. He received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon Cooper and John Bardeen for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, now known as the BCS Theory. Although superconductivity was first described by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, it was not fully understood until a complete theoretical explanation of the phenomenon was provided by the trio in 1957.
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