Michael Tinkham

Class of 1950: Superconductivity physicist

Michael Tinkham was an internationally renowned pioneer in the study of condensed matter physics, particularly superconductivity and magnetism.

He was born Feb. 23, 1928, in Brooklyn Township, Green Lake County, Wisconsin, and grew up on Watson Street in Ripon. Several members of his family  attended Ripon: His father, Clayton H. Tinkham, Class of 1920, who received a degree in chemistry and physics; his mother, Laverna, who received a degree in chemistry; uncles, who became chemistry professors at Marietta College in Ohio; an older brother, Clayton Carlos Tinkham, Class of 1949, who received a degree in economics; and a sister-in-law, Florence Zick Tinkham, Class of 1948.

After the family moved to Ripon, Tinkham attended school and took piano lessons from Lillian Zobel, Class of 1914, the sister of electrical engineer Dr. Otto Julius Zobel, Class of 1909, who helped advance early telephone technology at American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T) and Bell Laboratories. Tinkham became a highly accomplished pianist and had a love of music all his life.

At Ripon College, he majored in physics and mathematics on a dual two-year/three-year degree in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He participated in Ver Adest, music, Phi Kappa Pi (Merriman) and Phi Beta Kappa.

He received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in physics from MIT and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford, United Kingdom.

He took a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, eventually becoming full professor, where he developed his interest in superconductivity, a property that some metals have at very low temperatures of allowing current to flow through them with no resistance.

In 1966, he joined the faculty at Harvard University as full professor and remained there for the rest of his career. He also was a Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany in 1978-1979.

Until his retirement, he maintained an active research group at Harvard.

He was renowned as an experimental physicist and broad thinker who advanced the understanding of superconductivity and was able to explain it in understandable terms. He encouraged and mentored countless physicists.

His books, “Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics” (1964) and “Introduction to Superconductivity” (1975) are classics in the field.

A colleague of his once said, “You could present data to Mike that you thought were pigeon droppings and leave believing you had flakes of gold.”

Tinkham became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1970; and received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Physical Society in 1974, the Fred E. Saalfeld Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Science in 2005, and an honorary degree from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich.

Ripon College presented him with an honorary degree in 1976.

Tinkham died Nov. 4, 2010, at age 82.