Peter Grünberg is notoriously known as Nobel Laureate in Physics 2007, together with Albert Fert for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR). This discovery had a tremendous impact on our field of research, being often spotted as the birth act of Spintronics, and basis for many applications including highly-sensitive read heads for magnetic hard disk drives. While Peter Grünberg passed away recently, Albert Fert wrote a one-page obituary for Nature magazine. You may read how several decades of fundamental investigations paved the way for this discovery.
Link to Nature article
