Biography:Ivar Giaever

Ivar Giaever
Ivar Giæver
Giaever in 1973
Born	(1929-04-05)April 5, 1929 Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
Died	June 20, 2025(2025-06-20) (aged 96) Schenectady, New York, US
Citizenship	Norway United States (from 1964)
Alma mater	Norwegian Institute of Technology (MEng) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (PhD)
Known for	Tunneling in superconductors
Spouse(s)	Inger Skramstad (m. 1952; died 2023)
Children	4
Awards	Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1965) Nobel Prize in Physics (1973) Onsager Medal (2003) Gunnerus Medal (2010)
Scientific career
Fields	Condensed matter physics
Institutions	General Electric Canada General Electric Research Laboratory Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Thesis	The Conductivity and the Hall Effect in Binary Alloys (1964)
Doctoral advisor	Hillard Bell Huntington

Ivar Giaever (April 5, 1929 – June 20, 2025) was a Norwegian–American experimental physicist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson. One half of the prize was jointly awarded to Esaki and Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively."

Biography

Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway. He studied mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, graduating with an M.Eng. in 1952. The following year, he was employed by the Norwegian Patent Office as a patent examiner. In 1954, Giaever emigrated to Canada, where he joined the Advanced Engineering Program of General Electric Canada. He then moved to the United States in 1956, joining the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1958.

In 1964, Giaever received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) with a thesis, written under Hillard Bell Huntington, titled The Conductivity and the Hall Effect in Binary Alloys. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen that year. In 1988, he left General Electric to become an Institute Professor at RPI. The same year, he also became a professor at the University of Oslo, sponsored by Statoil.

Giaever died on June 20, 2025, in Schenectady, New York, at the age of 96. He is buried in the cemetery of Hoff Church in Østre Toten, Norway.

Research

From 1958 to 1969, Giaever worked on thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity. In 1960, following from Leo Esaki's discovery of tunneling in semiconductors in 1957, Giaever showed that tunneling also took place in superconductors, demonstrating tunneling through a very thin layer of oxide surrounded on both sides by metal in a superconducting or normal state. His experiments demonstrated the existence of an energy gap in superconductors, one of the most important predictions of the BCS theory of superconductivity, which had been developed in 1957. Giaever's experimental demonstration of tunneling in superconductors stimulated the theoretical physicist Brian Josephson to work on the phenomenon, leading to his prediction of the Josephson effect in 1962. Esaki and Giaever shared half of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Josephson received the other half.

Giaever's research later in his career was mainly in the field of biophysics. In 1969, he studied biophysics for a year at the University of Cambridge in England through a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continued to work in this area after he returned to the United States in 1970, founding the company Applied BioPhysics, Inc., in 1993.

Activism

Giaever was a climate change denier, who fueled doubt on climate change, for example calling it a "new religion." However, he had presented no strong evidence to support this position. On September 13, 2011, he resigned from the American Physical Society, after the organization called the evidence of damaging global warming "incontrovertible."

Giaever was a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that denies climate change.

Giaever co-signed a letter from over 70 Nobel laureate scientists to the Louisiana State Legislature supporting the repeal of the anti-evolution Louisiana Science Education Act.

Personal life

In 1952, Giaever married his childhood sweetheart, Inger Skramstad, who died on September 12, 2023, at the age of 94. They had four children.

Giaever was an atheist.

Recognition

Memberships

Year	Organization	Type	Ref.
1962	American Physical Society	Fellow
1974	National Academy of Sciences	Member
1975	National Academy of Engineering	Member

Awards

Year	Organization	Award	Citation	Ref.
1965	American Physical Society	Oliver E. Buckley Prize	"For being first to use electron tunneling in the study of the energy gap in super-conductors and for demonstrating the power of this technique."
1973	Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences	Nobel Prize in Physics	"For their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively."
2003	NTNU	Onsager Medal
2010	DKNVS	Gunnerus Medal

Honorary degrees

Year	University	Degree	Ref.
1985	Norwegian Institute of Technology	Doctor honoris causa

Publications

• Giaever, Ivar (1960). "Electron Tunneling Between Two Superconductors". Physical Review Letters 5 (10): 464–466. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.464. Bibcode: 1960PhRvL...5..464G. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.464. 
• Giaever, Ivar (1974). "Electron tunneling and superconductivity". Reviews of Modern Physics 46 (2): 245–250. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.46.245. Bibcode: 1974RvMP...46..245G. https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.245. 

External links

• Interview with Professor Ivar Giaever, from the Official Nobel Prize Website
• Miss nobel-id as parameter including the Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1973 Electron Tunneling and Superconductivity
• University of Oslo website about Ivar Giaever
• Family genealogy