About
Murray Gell-Mann, born September 15, 1929, in New York City and died May 24, 2019, in Santa Fe, was an American theoretical physicist. A child prodigy, he earned his PhD from MIT at age 21. He introduced the strangeness quantum number, proposed the Eightfold Way classification of hadrons, and predicted the omega-minus particle. In 1964, he proposed the existence of quarks as fundamental constituents of hadrons and contributed to the development of quantum chromodynamics. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the classification of elementary particles. He also co-founded the Santa Fe Institute and authored the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar.
* 1929-09-15 — † 2019-05-24
Major works
- The Quark and the Jaguar (1994)popular science book
Key milestones
- 1961Proposed the Eightfold Way, a classification of hadrons based on SU(3) symmetry.
- 1964Proposed the existence of quarks as fundamental constituents of hadrons.
- 1969Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to the classification of elementary particles.
Themes
Particle physicsSymmetries in physicsComplexityScience popularization
Sources: nobelprize.org · britannica.com · ias.edu
