9. The Nobel Prize winners

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1956 to John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley, talented American scientists, for investigations on Semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect, carried on at the Bell Tele­phone Laboratories.

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1908. He attended the University High School in Madison for several years, and graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in math­ematics and physics. Dr. Bardeen worked on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys physics at Princeton University. Here Dr. Bardeen be­came interested in solid state physics. He was offered a posi­tion as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent the next three years there working on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals. John Bardeen was awarded the Ph. D. degree at Princeton in 1936.

During the war years Dr. Bardeen worked on the influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and mine-sweeping. After the war, he joined the solid-state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Dr. Bardeen's main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. In 1956 the Nobel Prize was award­ed to Dr. Bardeen and his two colleagues for their talented work in the sphere of semiconductivity.

In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L. N, Copper and J. R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity, which has been a puzzle since its discovery in 1908. Much of his research effort since that time has been de­voted to further extensions and applications of the theory. Dr. Bardeen died in 1991.

Answer the following questions:

1. What American scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize?

2. What important investigation did they make?

3. When was John Bardeen born?

4. What education did he get?

5. Where did he work?

6. What were his scientific interests?

7. What problems did he work out during World War II?

8. What puzzle did he and his colleagues try to solve?

10. William h. Gates

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman and chief software ar­chitect of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft employs more than 55,000 people in 85 countries and regions.

Born on Oct. 28, 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sis-ters. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chair­woman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at the age of 13. In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman. While at Har­vard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 197S with his child­hood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.

Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost effective and more enjoyable for peo­ple to use computers. In 1999, Gates wrote "Business @ the Speed of Thought", a book that shows how computer technol­ogy can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries.

In addition to his love of computers and software, Gates founded Corbis, which is developing one of the world's largest resources of visual information -- a comprehensive digital ar­chive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe.

Gates was married in 1994, to Melinda French Gates. They have three children. Gates is fond of reading, and enjoys playing golf and bridge.