We share with tremendous sadness that our great colleague, Professor Leon Cooper, passed away on Wednesday, October 23, at the age of 94.

Leon made the groundbreaking discovery that electrons in metals can form bound pairs (Cooper pairs), making superconductivity possible. Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. Their Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity is the most successful theory of many-body systems, influencing the development of other groundbreaking theories in physics. 

 Leon joined the Brown faculty in 1958. He and his students made pioneering contributions to neuroscience; his original contribution to synaptic plasticity is the basis of neural memory and the Hopfield neural network model.  Dr. John J. Hopfield, awarded the Nobel Prize this year, cited Leon’s work on how neurons store information and communicate.  

Leon significantly impacted the broader field of physics, and his vision helped Brown Physics maintain the strong theoretical physics group it enjoys today. He inspired many of his colleagues and graduate students to tempt the impossible by first well-defining a problem and then outlining how it could be solved.

Leon’s influence on the legions of students he advised resounds throughout the field. Although he became emeritus faculty in 2020, Leon’s presence in the department drew many students to the program. Austin Szuminsky M.S. ’24 said Cooper may have initially brought him to the department as he was “inspired by physicists who moved into and around more biological questions or neuroscience at some point in their career by the perhaps less-conventional notion that it is possible to be more than one thing.”

An engaging speaker, Leon’s PHYS0100 course was extremely popular. A limited enrollment was ultimately imposed on the course due to the overwhelming response.

Leon is fondly remembered by both long-time and new colleagues at Brown Physics.  Students, staff, and faculty colleagues greatly appreciated his sense of humor, good taste for Scotch whisky and kindness to everyone.

Vesna Mitrović