Origins & Early Life

Robert Coleman Richardson (June 26, 1937 – February 19, 2013) was an American experimental physicist whose area of research included sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3. Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Richardson was born in Washington D.C. He went to high school at Washington-Lee in Arlington, Virginia.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

He later described Washington-Lee's biology and physics courses as "very old-fashioned" for the time. "The idea of 'advanced placement' had not yet been invented," he wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography. He took his first calculus course when he was a sophomore in college. Richardson attended Virginia Tech and received a B.S. in 1958 and a M.S.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

in 1960. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1966. At the time of his death, he was the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics at Cornell University, although he no longer operated a laboratory. From 1998 to 2007 he served as Cornell's vice provost for research...

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