Murray Gell-Mann
1929–2019, New York City, USA, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
American theoretical physicist who organized the particle zoo with the Eightfold Way and predicted quarks as the fundamental constituents of hadrons.
Educated at Yale and MIT under Victor Weisskopf, Gell-Mann joined the Institute for Advanced Study before settling at Caltech, where he dominated particle theory for two decades. Beyond the Eightfold Way he introduced strangeness, the V−A theory of the weak interaction with Feynman, and later helped found the Santa Fe Institute to study complex systems.
Nobel-winning work
Gell-Mann's 1969 Nobel Prize recognized 'contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions'. His strangeness quantum number (1953) explained why certain particles are produced copiously but decay slowly, and his Eightfold Way (1961) grouped mesons and baryons into SU(3) multiplets.
The scheme predicted the Ω− baryon, discovered in 1964 exactly where predicted. Interpreting the multiplets mathematically led him to quarks — fractionally charged constituents from which all hadrons are built — the conceptual foundation of the Standard Model.
Workplaces: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Santa Fe Institute
United States