Robert Coleman Richardson

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.