American physicist and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics, along with John Bardeen (Bardeen, John) and John Robert Schrieffer (Schrieffer, John Robert), for his role in developing the BCS (BCS theory) (for their initials) theory of superconductivity. The concept of Cooper electron pairs was named after him.

Cooper was educated at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1954. He taught at Ohio State University in Columbus before joining (1958) the faculty at Brown University, Providence, R.I., where he was appointed Henry Ledyard Goddard university professor in 1966 and Thomas J. Watson, Sr., professor of science in 1974.

His principal contribution to the BCS theory was the discovery (1956) that electrons, which under normal conditions repel each other, are attracted to each other in superconductors, a phenomenon termed the Cooper electron pairs.

He lectured extensively abroad and took a special interest in teaching physics to humanities students. His publications include An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (1968), Introduction to Methods of Optimization (1970), and Methods and Applications of Linear Programming (1974).