Murray Gell-Mann Born: 15-Sep-1929 Birthplace: Manhattan, NY Died: 24-May-2019 Location of death: Santa Fe, NM Cause of death: unspecified
Gender: Male Religion: Agnostic Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Physicist Party Affiliation: Democratic Nationality: United States Executive summary: Quarks and strangeness American theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann developed the concept of strangeness for particles in 1953, explaining with a quantum number why some hadrons decay rapidly by the strong nuclear force while others decay more slowly by the weak force, contrary to previous theories. This curious difference in decay rates amounts to about one hundred-millionth of a second. In 1961 he proposed the Eightfold way, a new classification system for baryons (heavy subatomic particles) to explain the almost infinitely complex kinds of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei. In 1964 he discovered the quark, omega-minus particles believed to be fundamental building blocks of neutrons, protons, and matter itself. This discovery strengthened evidence for the Eightfold Way, brought that theory into widespread acceptance, and brought Gell-Mann the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.
He has said that the word quark was borrowed from James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. His discovery of the quark was concurrent but independent of the work of George Zweig (1937-), and his elucidation of the Eightfold way was also explained independently by Yuval Ne'eman (1925-2006). As a young man he studied under Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. At CalTech he worked down the hall from Richard Feynman and arguably made greater contributions to physics, as their early friendship faded to frustration and a feud (at least on Gell-Mann's part) by the 1980s. In 1984 he was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, a center for theoretical research. Father: Isidore Gell-Mann ("Arthur", taught English as a second language) Mother: Pauline Reichstein Brother: Benedict Gelman (photographer, reporter) Wife: J. Margaret Dow (m. 19-Apr-1955, d. 1981, one daughter, one son) Daughter: Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann (b. 21-Oct-1956) Son: Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann (b. 6-Jul-1963) Wife: Marcia Southwick (m. 1992, div., one stepson) Son: Nicholas Southwick Levis (stepson, b. 26-Oct-1978)
High School: Columbia Grammar School, New York, NY (1944) University: BS Physics, Yale University (1948) University: PhD Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1951) Scholar: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1951) Scholar: University of Illinois (1952-53) Teacher: University of Chicago (1952-54) Scholar: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1955-56) Teacher: California Institute of Technology (1955-56) Professor: California Institute of Technology (1956-67) Scholar: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1967-68) Professor: R. A. Millikan Professor, California Institute of Technology (1967-93) Administrator: Founding Member, Santa Fe Institute (1984) Professor: Santa Fe Institute (1993-)
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics 1959
E. O. Lawrence Award 1966 Benjamin Franklin Medal 1967 (by the Franklin Institute) John J. Carty Medal 1968
Nobel Prize for Physics 1969 Research Corporation Award 1969
Erice Science for Peace Prize 1989
Albert Einstein Medal 2005 Humanist of the Year 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science 1994 American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1964 American Philosophical Society 1993 American Physical Society 1960 Century Association Cosmos Club Council on Foreign Relations 1975 Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow CSICOP 1985-present Explorers Club French Physical Society 1970 (Foreign Member)
GivingSpace Indian Academy of Sciences 1985 (Foreign Member) International Academy of Humanism Laureate JASON John Kerry for President Los Alamos National Laboratory (1982-) MacArthur Foundation Director (1979-2002) National Academy of Sciences 1960 Pakistan Academy of Sciences 1985 (Foreign Member)
Phi Beta Kappa Society RAND Corporation Consultant Royal Society 1978 (Foreign Member) Russian Academy of Sciences 1993 (Foreign Member) Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society Smithsonian Institution Regent (1974-88) Wildlife Conservation Society 1994 The Third Culture Austrian Ancestry
Hungarian Ancestry
Jewish Ancestry
Ukrainian Ancestry
Official Website: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/mgm/
Author of books:
The Eightfold Way (1964, non-fiction, with Yuval Ne'eman) Broken Scale Invariance and the Light Cone (1971, non-fiction, with Kenneth Wilson) The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, non-fiction) The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994, non-fiction) The Regular and the Random (2002, non-fiction) Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers (2009, non-fiction)
Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2019 Soylent Communications
|