Bernd Teo MatthiasBorn 8 Jun 1918; died 27 Oct 1980 at age 62.Bernd Teo Matthias was a German-American physicist who was a researcher in superconductivity, and discovered nearly 1,000 superconducting materials. He completed his education up to a Ph.D. degree (1943) in Germany, and immigrated to the U.S. (1947) working at M.I.T., then Bell Labs. He began low-temperature physics at the University of Chicago (1949). By 1961, he had moved to the University of California, San Diego and founded the Institute for the Study of Matter there (1962). By finding superconductivity, ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism in many hundreds of new materials, he showed these properties to be common occurences in nature, rather than in the rare instances he knew at the beginning of his work in the field. His success in finding new examples was said to be based on his intuition of the relationships he could see in the Periodic Table.« |
