Michael Tinkham

Michael " Mike" Tinkham ( born February 23, 1928 in Green Lake County, Wisconsin, † November 4, 2010 in Portland, Oregon) was an American physicist who worked on solid state physics.

Tinkham studied at Ripon College (Bachelor 1951) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Master 1951), where he received his doctorate in 1954. In 1954/55 he was at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, and from 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1957 and then professor. From 1966 he was a professor at Harvard University. Since 1966 he was there Gordon McKay Research Professor of Applied Physics and also since 1980 Rumford Research Professor of Physics. He stood from 1975 to 1978 the Physics Faculty ago. 1978/79 he was a Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist at the University of Karlsruhe.

He was known especially for his work on superconductors and wrote about this a standard textbook. In the 2000s he focused on materials with dimensions in the nanometer range, such as nanowires and carbon nanotubes.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1970. In 1974 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize.

Writings

• Superconductivity, Gordon and Breach 1966
• Introduction to Superconductivity, McGraw Hill, 1975, 2nd edition 1996, Dover 2004
• Group theory and quantum mechanics, McGraw Hill 1964, Dover 2003