John Bannister Goodenough, the co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries and the co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, passed away, one month before turning 101. His passing away was confirmed by Goodenough’s pupil, Nicholas Grundish.
Goodenough’s Nobel Prize co-winner, Stan Whittingham, a British-Amrican scientist was the first to find out that lithium can be held inside sheets of titanium sulphide, and Goodenough refined it with a cobalt-based cathode to come up with what we know and use today.
The Nobel Prize winner, who was born in Germany to American parents, was also instrumental in the invention of computer RAMs. Post his mathematics study at Yale University, he went on to join the US Army as a meteorologist during WWII.
Goodenough later earned a PhD in Physics at the University of Chicago in 1952. He later went on to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University in the UK and even taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
