Leon N. Cooper (né Kupchik; February 28, 1930 – October 23, 2024) was an American theoretical physicist and neuroscientist.

[4] Leon attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1947[5][6] He then studied at Columbia University in nearby Upper Manhattan, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951.

[7] He remained at Columbia for graduate school, obtaining a Master of Arts degree in 1953[7] and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 1954.

[7] In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Science at Brown, an endowed chair funded by Thomas J. Watson Sr.[7] Cooper held visiting research positions at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland.

[citation needed] Along with colleague Charles Elbaum, he founded the tech company Nestor in 1975, which sought commercial applications for artificial neural networks.

After further development, Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer showed how this could produce superconductivity, publishing their theory in Physical Reviews in two papers during 1957.

In 1982, Cooper and two doctoral students, Elie Bienenstock and Paul Munro, published their theory of synaptic plasticity in The Journal of Neuroscience.

[4] Cooper was the author of Science and Human Experience – a collection of essays, including previously unpublished material, on issues such as consciousness and the structure of space.