Leon Lederman

Origins and early life

Leon Max Lederman was born in New York City on 15 July 1922, the second son of Morris and Minna Lederman, Russian Jewish immigrants; his father ran a hand laundry and revered learning. He studied chemistry at the City College of New York, where friends such as Martin Klein drew him towards physics, and graduated in 1943. After three years in the Army Signal Corps, he entered Columbia University in 1946, took his doctorate in 1951 and stayed on its faculty for twenty-eight years, directing its Nevis Laboratories from 1961 to 1978.

Work and career

In 1962 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, he produced a beam of neutrinos and showed that there is a second kind, the muon neutrino, which confirmed that elementary particles are grouped in pairs. In 1977, at Fermilab, he led the team that discovered the bottom quark, and in 1979 he became the laboratory's director, building the Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle collider from 1983 until 2010.

Recognition

In 1988 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. Devoted to teaching, he helped found the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy for gifted pupils, and after leaving Fermilab in 1989 for the University of Chicago he set up a Teachers' Academy to retrain Chicago's science and mathematics teachers.

In 1993, with the writer Dick Teresi, he published The God Particle, a popular book on the Higgs boson whose title, he later explained, used God as a metaphor for nature and its puzzles. He died in Rexburg, Idaho, on 3 October 2018, at the age of ninety-six.