Robert B. Laughlin

Robert Betts Laughlin was born on November 1, 1950, in Visalia, California. After serving in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, Laughlin completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics at UC Berkeley and his doctorate in physics at MIT in 1979.

While working at Bell Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1983, Laughlin formulated the groundbreaking theoretical wave function that explained the fractional quantum Hall effect discovered by Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui. He proved that under extreme magnetic fields and ultra-low temperatures, interacting electrons condense into a novel quantum fluid whose excitations behave as 'quasiparticles' carrying fractional fractions (such as 1/3 or 1/5) of an electron's fundamental charge.

In 1998, Laughlin, Störmer, and Tsui shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Laughlin later served as President of KAIST in South Korea and authored the acclaimed books 'A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down' (2005) and 'Powering the Future'.