Martin Perl

Origins and early life

Martin Lewis Perl (1927-2014) was born in New York to Jewish immigrants from the Polish part of Russia; his mother Fay was a secretary and bookkeeper, his father Oscar a stationery salesman who founded a printing and advertising firm.

Work and career

Trained as a chemical engineer at Brooklyn Polytechnic, he worked for General Electric in a factory making electron vacuum tubes and enrolled in evening courses in atomic physics to understand how they worked — the detour that made him a physicist. He took his doctorate at Columbia under Isidor Isaac Rabi, measuring the nuclear quadrupole moment of sodium by the atomic-beam resonance method that had earned Rabi his own Nobel, spent eight years at the University of Michigan studying strong interactions with bubble and spark chambers, and moved in 1963 to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, then being built.

There, between 1974 and 1977, with the SPEAR electron-positron ring and the LBL magnetic detector, he and his colleagues detected the tau lepton, a third-generation cousin of the electron. The discovery brought him the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics.