John B. Goodenough's Role in Solid State Chemistry Community: A Thrilling Scientific Tale Told by a French Chemist.

In this tribute to John B. Goodenough I will describe how John's talk on the metal-to-nonmetal transition of vanadium oxide VO, presented at the Bordeaux Conference (September 1964) attended by inorganic chemists, metallurgists, crystallographers, thermodynamicists and physicists, provided a pioneering vision of interdisciplinary research to come. John gave a complete description of the paradigm on how the physical properties of a solid depend on its structure and bonding, by employing the chemical notions as local distortions and interatomic distances as well as the physics notions such as band width and the Hubbard on-site repulsion U.