who worked at Harvard, Minnesota University, and Bell Telephone Labs before becoming a professor at the University of Illinois in 1951. At Bell, with Walter Brattain (1902–87) and William Shockley (1910–89), he developed the point-contact transistor. The three scientists shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics for this work. In 1957, with Leon Cooper (1930– ) and Robert Schreiffer (1931– ), he formulated the BCS theory of superconductivity, for which they shared the 1972 Nobel Prize.