Leon Cooper


Leon N. Cooper is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate who, with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity. He is also the namesake of the Cooper pair and co-developer of the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.

Biography and career

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 University in 1958. He is the Thomas J. Watson Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems.
In 1969 Cooper married Kay Allard. They have two children.
He has carried out research at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study and the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.
The character Sheldon Cooper, featured in the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named in part after Leon Cooper.

Memberships and honors

Cooper is the author of – a collection of essays, including previously unpublished material, on issues such as consciousness and the structure of space.
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Cooper is the author of an unconventional liberal-arts physics textbook, originally An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics and still in print in a somewhat condensed form as Physics: Structure and Meaning.