John Bardeen, 83, Won Nobel Prize Twice
CHICAGO - John Bardeen, two-time Nobel Prize winner for his work on transistors and superconductivity, died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 83.
Widely regarded by the scientific community as a genius on the level of Albert Einstein, Mr. Bardeen was the last surviving member of the Bell Telephone Laboratories team that invented the transistor.
The invention prompted an electronics revolution, turning room-sized computers into pocket calculators and helping send men to the moon.
``The whole damn structure of civilization depends on Bardeen's technology,'' Nick Holonyak, a professor at the University of Illinois, once said. ``It's impossible to measure the number of lives he's touched. He's not just a hero, but a hero beyond our comprehension.''
In 1956, Mr. Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with his colleagues, the late Walter Brattain and the late William B. Shockley. When he was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize for superconductivity, he became the first in history to win the prize twice in the same field.
He regarded superconductivity, which he researched with Robert Schrieffer and Leon Cooper, as his most important achievement.
Throughout his career, Mr. Bardeen won more than 30 awards, including the 1988 Lomonosov Prize from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the 1965 National Medal of Science and the 1976 Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1989, Sony Corp. endowed a $3 million John Bardeen Chair at the University of Illinois.
Born in Madison, Wis., Mr. Bardeen earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1928 and 1929 from the University of Wisconsin.
After a three-year research stint at Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, he returned to school, receiving a doctorate in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1936. He taught at the University of Minnesota and conducted research at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C., before joining Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hills, N.J., Mr. Bardeen was professor emeritus and faculty member of the University of Illinois-Champaign since 1951.
He is survived by his wife, Jane; his daughter, Elizabeth Greytak; two sons, James and William; and six grandchildren.