His father Irving Kupchik was from Belarus and moved to theUnited States after theRussian Revolution in 1917. His mother Anna (née Zola) Kupchik was from Poland; she died when Leon was seven.[4] His father changed the family'ssurname from Kupchick to Cooper when he remarried.[4]
Cooper first married Martha Kennedy, with whom he had two daughters.[4] In 1969, he married for a second time, to Kay Allard.[14] He died at his home inProvidence, Rhode Island, on October 23, 2024, at the age of 94.[4]
While Cooper was a postdoc at Princeton, he was approached byJohn Bardeen, a professor at the University of Illinois, and Bardeen's graduate studentJohn Robert Schrieffer. Bardeen and Schrieffer were working onsuperconductivity, a topic which was new to Cooper, but he agreed to collaborate with them. Superconductivity had beenexperimentally discovered in 1911, but there was no theoretical explanation for the phenomenon. Cooper moved to Illinois as a postdoc to work with Bardeen.
After a year of theoretical investigation, Cooper developed the idea of aquasiparticle composed of two bound electrons, now known as aCooper pair. Cooper published his concept of Cooper pairs inPhysical Review in September 1956.[4][15] The movement of Cooper pairs through a low-temperature metal would be almost unimpeded, producing a very lowelectrical resistance. After further development, Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer showed how this could produce superconductivity, publishing their theory inPhysical Reviews in two papers during 1957.[4][16][17] This theory became known as theBCS theory, after the authors' initials, and is widely accepted as the explanation forconventional superconductivity. Bardeen, Schrieffer and Cooper were awarded theNobel Prize in Physics in 1972 for their theory.[4]
After joining Brown University, Cooper became interested inneuroscience, particularly the process oflearning. In 1982, Cooper and two doctoral students, Elie Bienenstock and Paul Munro, published their theory ofsynaptic plasticity inThe Journal of Neuroscience.[4] They estimated the weakening and strengthening ofsynapses that could occur without saturation of the connections. As synapses saturate, electrical connections become less effective, thereby reducing the saturation. Connections therefore oscillate between saturation and unsaturation without reaching their limits. Their theory explained how thevisual cortex works and how people learn to see. It became known as theBCM theory, after the authors' initials.[4]
Cooper was the author ofScience and Human Experience – a collection of essays, including previously unpublished material, on issues such as consciousness and the structure of space.(Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Cooper also wrote an unconventional liberal-arts physics textbook, originallyAn Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (Harper and Row, 1968)[19] and still in print in a somewhat condensed form asPhysics: Structure and Meaning (Lebanon: New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1992).
^Cushing, James T. (1978). "Review ofAn Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics by Leon N. Cooper".American Journal of Physics.46 (1):114–115.Bibcode:1978AmJPh..46..114C.doi:10.1119/1.11116.
Leon Cooper on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1972Microscopic Quantum Interference Effects in the Theory of Superconductivity
