Bednorz was born in
Neuenkirchen,
North Rhine-Westphalia,
Germany to elementary-school teacher Anton and piano teacher Elisabeth Bednorz, as the youngest of four children. His parents were both from
Silesia in Central Europe, but
were forced to move westwards in turbulences of World War II. As a child, his parents tried to get him interested in classical music, but he was more practically inclined, preferring to work on motorcycles and cars. (Although as a teenager he did eventually learn to play the violin and trumpet.) In high school he developed an interest in the natural sciences, focusing on
chemistry, which he could learn in a hands-on manner through experiments. After another visit in 1973, he came to Zurich in 1974 for six months to do the experimental part of his diploma work. Here he grew crystals of SrTiO3, a ceramic material belonging to the family of
perovskites. Müller, himself interested in perovskites, urged him to continue his research, and after obtaining his master's degree from Münster in 1977 Bednorz started a PhD at the
ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) under supervision of Heini Gränicher and Alex Müller. In 1978, his future wife, Mechthild Wennemer, whom he had met in Münster, followed him to Zürich to start her own PhD. In 1983, Bednorz and Müller began a systematic study of the electrical properties of ceramics formed from
transition metal oxides, and in 1986 they succeeded in inducing superconductivity in a
lanthanum barium copper oxide (LaBaCuO, also known as LBCO). The oxide's
critical temperature (Tc) was 35 K, a full 12 K higher than the previous record. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in
high-temperature superconductivity on cuprate materials with structures similar to LBCO, soon leading to the discovery of compounds such as
BSCCO (Tc 107K) and
YBCO (Tc 92K). In 1987, Bednorz and Müller were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". In the same year Bednorz was appointed an
IBM Fellow. ==Awards and honors==