John B Goodenough, the oldest Nobel Prize winner dies at age 100: Who was he?

John Goodenough, an eminent Nobel laureate and pioneer in the advancement of lithium-ion batteries, passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough's landmark contribution in the field of chemistry today powers mobile phones and electric vehicles, for which the American scientist was awarded the prestigious 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Notably, Goodenough became the oldest recipient ever of a Nobel Prize for receiving the accolade at the age of 97.

Who was John Goodenough? 5 things about him:

1)Goodenugh would have turned 101 next month. He was born on July 25, 1922, in Jena, Germany, to American parents. He pursued his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the esteemed Yale University before obtaining his master's and PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1952.

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2)He went onto to become a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later served as the head of of the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford in Britain.

3)Goodenough played a pivotal role in the early development of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes. Today, LFP is rapidly overtaking more-expensive nickel cobalt manganese in electric vehicle batteries, due to LFP's abundance, sustainability, and substantially lower cost. Other than him, Britain's Stanley Whittingham and Japan's Akira Yoshino also shared the prize for their research in this field the same year.

4)Goodenough also served as a meteorologist in the US Army during the Second World War. He is described as "a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career," by Jay Hartzell, the president of University of Texas at Austin where he served as a professor in the final years of his life.

5)He joined the Texas university in 1986 and continued as a faculty member for the next 37 years until his demise. He and his team at the university were recently exploring new directions for energy storage.

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