Herring, (William) Conyers (1914– )

US physicist. His work at Bell Laboratories (1946–78) on spin wave theory was one of the first studies of collective excitations in metals. His research during the 1940s and 1950s on transform phenomena in semiconductors was essential to present understanding of solid state theory. Herring was born in Scotia, New York. He was a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1937–39), then taught at Princeton University (1939–40) and the University of Missouri (1940–41). He performed war research at Columbia University (1941–45). From 1978–1981 he was a professor at Stanford University.