Michael Tinkham, superconductivity pioneer, 82
Michael “Mike” Tinkham, the Rumford Professor of Physics and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics Emeritus at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Physics, passed away on Nov. 4. He was 82 years old. Born on Feb. 23, 1928, in Green Lake County, Wis., Tinkham earned his undergraduate degree at Ripon College in 1951 and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees, both in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also spent a year at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957, rising to full professor, and then left in 1996 for Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his career. Tinkham’s research focused primarily on superconductivity, as captured in his classic text, “Introduction to Superconductivity.” In his later years he was active in studying the unique properties of materials when sample dimensions are reduced to...