John Bannister Goodenough ( GUUD-in-uf; July 25, 1922 – June 25, 2023) was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1986 he was a professor of Materials Science, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access magnetic memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Goodenough was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Copley Medal, the Fermi Award, the Draper Prize, and the Japan Prize. The John B. Goodenough Award in materials science is named for him. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino; at 97 years old, he became the oldest Nobel laureate in history. From August 27, 2021, until his death, he was the oldest living Nobel Prize laureate.
Personal life and education John Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, to American parents, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (1893–1965) and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. He came from an academic family. His father, a graduate student at Oxford when John was born, eventually became a professor of religious history at Yale. His brother Ward became an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. John also had two half-siblings from his father's second marriage: Ursula Goodenough, emeritus professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis; and Daniel Goodenough, emeritus professor of biology at Harvard Medical School. In his school years Goodenough suffered from dyslexia. At the time, dyslexia was poorly understood by the medical community, and Goodenough's condition went undiagnosed and untreated. Although his primary schools considered him "a backward student," he taught himself to write so that he could take the entrance exam for Groton School, the boarding school where his older brother was studying at the time. He was awarded a full scholarship. At Groton, his grades improved and he eventually graduated at the top of his class in 1940. He also developed an interest in exploring nature, plants, and animals. Although he was raised an atheist, he converted to Protestant Christianity in high school. After Groton, Goodenough graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He completed his coursework in early 1943 (after just two and a half years) and received his degree in 1944, covering his expenses by tutoring and grading exams. He had initially sought to enlist in the military following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but his mathematics professor convinced him to stay at Yale for another year so that he could finish his coursework, which qualified him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps' meteorology department. After World War II ended, Goodenough obtained a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, the latter in 1952. His doctoral supervisor was Clarence Zener, a theorist in electrical breakdown; he also worked and studied with physicists, including Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson. While at Chicago, he met Canadian history graduate student Irene Wiseman. They married in 1951. The couple had no children. Irene died in 2016. Goodenough turned 100 on July 25, 2022. He died at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas, on June 25, 2023, one month shy of what would have been his 101st birthday.
Career and research Over his career, Goodenough authored more than 550 articles, 85 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963) and Les oxydes des metaux de transition (1973).
MIT Lincoln Laboratory After his studies, Goodenough was a research scientist and team leader at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 24 years. At MIT, he was part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing random-access magnetic memory. His research focused on magnetism and on the metal–insulator transition behavior in transition-metal oxides. His research efforts on RAM led him to develop the concepts of cooperative orbital ordering, also known as a cooperative Jahn–Teller distortion, in oxide materials. They subsequently led him to develop (with Junjiro Kanamori) the Goodenough–Kanamori rules, a set of semi-empirical rules to predict the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials; superexchange is a core property for high-temperature superconductivity.
University of Oxford
The U.S. government eventually terminated Goodenough's research funding, so during the late 1970s and early 1980s, he left the United States and continued his career as head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. Among the highlights of his work at Oxford, Goodenough is credited with significant research essential to the development of commercial lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Goodenough was able to expand upon previous work from M. Stanley Whittingham on battery materials, and found in 1980 that by using LixCoO2 as a lightweight, high energy density cathode material, he could double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries. Although Goodenough saw a commercial potential of batteries with his LiCoO2 and LiNiO2 cathodes and approached the University of Oxford with a request to patent this invention, it refused. Unable to afford the patenting expenses with his academic salary, Goodenough turned to UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, which accepted his offer, but under the terms, which provided zero royalty payment to the inventors John B. Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima. In 1990, the AERE licensed Goodenough's patents to Sony Corporation, which was followed by other battery manufacturers. It was estimated, that the AERE made over 10 million British pounds from this licensing. The work at Sony on further improvements to Goodenough's invention was led by Akira Yoshino, who had developed a scaled up design of the battery and manufacturing process. Goodenough received the Japan Prize in 2001 for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight high energy density rechargeable lithium batteries, and he, Whittingham, and Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research in lithium-ion batteries.
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