David Gross

Origins and early life

David Jonathan Gross was born in Washington on 19 February 1941, into a Jewish American family whose people had come from Austria-Hungary — his grandfather was born in Hungary — the son of Nora Faine and Bertram Gross. The family moved to Israel when he was a boy: he went to the Hebrew University Secondary School in Jerusalem and took his first degree at the Hebrew University in 1962, then a doctorate at Berkeley in 1966 under Geoffrey Chew.

Work and career

The question he took up at Princeton was why quarks, which no experiment can pull out of a proton, behave in high-energy collisions as though they were barely bound at all. In 1973, with his first graduate student Frank Wilczek, he found the answer in the equations: in a non-Abelian gauge theory the strong force does the opposite of what every other force does, weakening as two quarks are pushed together and growing as they are pulled apart.

They called it asymptotic freedom, and it explained both halves of the puzzle at once — why quarks look free inside a proton, and why no one will ever hold one alone.

Recognition

On it Gross and Wilczek built quantum chromodynamics, which completed the Standard Model, and it brought them the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Politzer, who had reached the same result independently. With Jeffrey Harvey, Emil Martinec and Ryan Rohm he then formulated the heterotic string, the four of them nicknamed the Princeton String Quartet. He held a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Dirac Medal in 1988, and has directed the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara.