Jerome Friedman

Origins and early life

Jerome Isaac Friedman was born in Chicago on 28 March 1930 to Selig Friedman, a sewing-machine salesman, and Lillian Warsaw, Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. He drew well enough that the Art Institute of Chicago offered him a scholarship, and he turned it down: he had read a book on relativity by Einstein and wanted physics instead. He studied it at the University of Chicago, worked there under Enrico Fermi, took his doctorate in 1956 and joined the faculty of MIT in 1960.

Work and career

Between 1968 and 1969, commuting between Cambridge and California, Friedman worked with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. They fired high-energy electrons at protons and at neutrons bound in nuclei, and watched how the electrons came out. Were the proton a soft, uniform ball of charge, the electrons would graze past it; instead an unexpected number came back at wide angles, exactly as they would after striking small hard objects inside.

That is deep inelastic scattering, and it was the first experimental evidence that the proton has parts — the quarks that Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig had proposed on paper in 1964. The three experimenters shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics. Friedman is institute professor and professor of physics emeritus at MIT, and sits on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.