Conyers Herring

Conyers Herring was an American physicist who lived from 1914 to 2009, known for developing the orthogonalized plane wave method for band structure calculations in 1940 and for predicting Weyl semimetals in 1937, a prediction experimentally confirmed in 2015. He earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1937 under Eugene Wigner, worked at Bell Laboratories from 1946 to 1978 where he founded its theoretical physics division, and afterward became a professor of applied physics at Stanford University until 2009. He received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize in 1959 and the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing in 1980. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1984, shared with Philippe Nozieres, for contributions to the fundamental theory of solids and the behavior of electrons in metals.