John B. Goodenough, 100, deceased; Nobel laureate of the lithium-ion battery

“Goodenough’s original lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode structure is still used in the lithium-ion batteries found in nearly all personal electronics such as smartphones and tablets,” Helen Gregg wrote in The Journal of the University of Chicago in 2016. “When he was tinkering with oxides at Oxford, Goodenough had no idea of ​​the impact his battery would have.”

John Bannister Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, the second of four children of Erwin and Helen (Lewis) Goodenough. His father was in the process of completing his studies at Oxford University, and the family returned to the United States when John was still a baby, settling in Woodbridge, Conn.

In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Dr. Goodenough that he and his siblings, Ward, James and Hester, had “mismatched” parents who were “aloof” with their children. John also struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and was considered a backward student in local primary schools. As a teenager at Groton School in Massachusetts, he made adjustments to cope with dyslexia.

“I overcame it in a way,” he recalls. “I could read mechanically. And I kind of covered my tracks by avoiding English and history and focusing on math and languages ​​- six years of Latin and four years of Greek. Strict educational standards at Groton and Yale also gave structure to his life, he said.

He graduated at the top of his Groton class in 1940 and received a scholarship to Yale, where he majored in mathematics, tutoring, and holding other jobs to pay for his education. He had nearly completed his undergraduate studies in 1943 when he was called to active duty in the wartime Army Air Forces. He received his degree after Yale gave him credit for a military meteorology course. He served in Newfoundland and the Azores.

After the war, he received a government scholarship to study physics at the University of Chicago. He received a master’s degree in 1951 and a doctorate a year later. After briefly working for Westinghouse, he began his career at MIT

In 1951 he married Irene Wiseman. They had no children. She died in 2016. He is survived by a sister, Ursula W. Goodenough, and a brother, Daniel A. Goodenough, both of whom are professors emeritus of biology.

Dr. Goodenough held Virginia H. Cockrell’s Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas. He wrote eight books and more than 800 articles for scientific journals. His awards include the Japan Prize, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Welch Award in Chemistry, and the National Medal of Science, which he received from President Barack Obama in 2011.

Alex Traub And Changche reporting contributed.