John Bannister Goodenough, co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries and co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has passed away. He was only a month away from turning 101. Nicholas Grundish, Goodenough’s pupil, verified his death to a media source.
Stan Whittingham, a British-American scientist who shared the Nobel Prize with Goodenough, was the first to discover that lithium may be held within sheets of titanium sulphide. Goodenough refined it with a cobalt-based cathode to produce a product that now affects practically everyone’s lives.
Goodenough was also instrumental in the invention of computer RAM (Random Access Memory). According to the Nobel Prize website, John Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany to American parents. After studying mathematics at Yale University, he joined the US Army as a meteorologist during the Second World War.
He then attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in physics in 1952. He then worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He had formerly taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
Witness to Grace, Goodenough’s autobiography, was published in 2008, and he described it as “my personal history.” The book discusses both science and spirituality.
