# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/robert-coleman-richardson
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:01:28.799Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/robert-coleman-richardson"
name: "Robert Coleman Richardson"
slug: "robert-coleman-richardson"
description: "He found a state of matter no one thought helium could enter — and at temperatures closer to absolute zero than almost anything achieved before."
tagline: "American physicist"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Robert_Coleman_Richardson.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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category:
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profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1937-06-26"
deathDate: "2013-02-19"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  historical:           22.024876
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Richardson was born in Washington D.C. in 1937 and attended high school at Washington-Lee in Arlington, Virginia, where the science curriculum struck him as old-fashioned; advanced placement didn't exist yet, and he didn't take calculus until his sophomore year of college. He earned a B.S. from Virginia Tech in 1958, an M.S. in 1960, and a PhD from Duke in 1965. By 1972 he was a senior researcher at Cornell's Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, working in sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3 alongside David Lee and graduate student Douglas Osheroff. That year the three discovered superfluidity in helium-3 atoms — a property that redefined what matter could do at the edge of absolute zero. The work earned them the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. Richardson died February 19, 2013.