Murray Gell-Mann | |
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Born |
Manhattan, New York City, U.S. |
September 15, 1929
Residence | United States |
Citizenship | United States |
Nationality | American |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | |
Alma mater |
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Thesis | Coupling strength and nuclear reactions (1951) |
Doctoral advisor | Victor Weisskopf |
Doctoral students | |
Known for | |
Notable awards |
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Spouse |
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Children | Two + 1 stepchild |
Website www |
Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmʌri ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. Gell-Mann has spent several periods at CERN, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 1972.
He introduced, independently of George Zweig, the quark—constituents of all hadrons—having first identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of hadrons. This symmetry is now understood to underlie the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, a quantum number which he also discovered.