Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann (September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019)

was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles.

Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group

as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics.

He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and

spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons.

At Yale, he participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was on the team representing Yale University (along with Murray Gerstenhaber and Henry O. Pollak) that won the second prize in 1947.

Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics.

He sought to remain in the Ivy League for his graduate education and applied to Princeton University as well as Harvard University.

He was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution was unable to offer him needed financial assistance.

He was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a letter from Victor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant.

This would provide Gell-Mann with the financial assistance he required.

Unaware of MIT's eminent status in physics research,

Gell-Mann was "miserable" with the fact that he would not be able to attend Princeton or Harvard and in characteristic dark irony, said he considered suicide.

Gell-Mann stated that he realized he could try to first enter MIT and commit suicide afterwards if he found it to be truly terrible.

However, he couldn't first choose suicide and then attend MIT; the two "didn't commute", as Gell-Mann said.

He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1951 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Coupling strength and nuclear reactions", under the supervision of Weisskopf.

Subsequently, Gell-Mann was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1951, and a visiting research professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1952 to 1953.

He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University and an associate professor at the University of Chicago in 1954–1955, before moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until he retired in 1993.

Gell-Mann married J. Margaret Dow in 1955; they had a daughter and a son.

He was on sabbatical at the Collège de France for the academic year 1958–1959.

Murray Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.

Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine.

His parents were Pauline (née Reichstein) and Arthur Isidore Gelman, who taught English as a second language.

Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature and mathematics, he graduated valedictorian from the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School aged 14 and subsequently entered Yale College as a member of Jonathan Edwards College.

In the 1970s he was a co-inventor of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces.

Gell-Mann spent several periods at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow in 1972.

Margaret died in 1981, and in 1992 he married Marcia Southwick, whose son became his stepson.

Gell-Mann's extensive interests outside of physics included archaeology, numismatics, birdwatching and linguistics.

Along with S. A. Starostin, he established the Evolution of Human Languages project at the Santa Fe Institute.

As a humanist and an agnostic, Gell-Mann was a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism.

Novelist Cormac McCarthy saw Gell-Mann as a polymath who "knew more things about more things than anyone I've ever met...losing Murray is like losing the Encyclopædia Britannica."

In 1984 Gell-Mann was one of several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute—a non-profit theoretical research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico intended to study various aspects of a complex system and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of complexity theory.

He wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994).

The title of the book is taken from a line of a poem by Arthur Sze: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night".

The author George Johnson has written a biography of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999),

which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize.

Gell-Mann died on May 24, 2019, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at California Institute of Technology as well as a university professor in the physics and astronomy department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

He was a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica.