The Swiss-born solid-state physicist Karl Alexander Müller (born 1927) spent years at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory studying the properties of a class of compounds called perovskites. In collaboration with J. Georg Bednorz, he began to examine their superconducting properties in the early 1980s, which led to the discovery that these compounds superconduct at record high temperatures.

K. Alex Müller was born on April 20, 1927, in Basel, Switzerland. His family was fairly wealthy (his grandfather founded a chocolate company) and could afford to entertain Müller's teen-aged interests in radio and electronics. The first years of his life were spent with his parents in Salzburg, Austria, where his father studied music. He and his mother later moved to Dornach, near his birthplace, to the home of his grandparents; and from there they moved to Lugano, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Müller soon became...