Murray Gell-Mann

Origins and early life

Murray Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan on 15 September 1929 to Jewish immigrants from Czernowitz, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Ukraine; his father Arthur taught English as a second language, his mother was Pauline Reichstein. He was valedictorian of the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School at fourteen, took a physics degree at Yale in 1948 and a doctorate at MIT in 1951 under Victor Weisskopf, and from 1955 until his retirement in 1993 taught at Caltech.

Work and career

The particles pouring out of cosmic-ray experiments in the 1950s had no order to them. Gell-Mann imposed one twice over: first with strangeness, a quantum number conserved by the strong and electromagnetic forces but not by the weak, and then in 1961 with a classification he called the eightfold way, after the Buddhist path, which arranged the particles in octets — the same scheme Yuval Ne'eman found independently. In 1964 he and, separately, George Zweig drew the conclusion the pattern implied: the particles are not elementary but built from smaller objects, which Gell-Mann named quarks after a line in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 1972 helped found quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the force that binds quarks. He was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984 and wrote The Quark and the Jaguar for general readers. He died at his home in Santa Fe on 24 May 2019.