Murray Gell-Mann 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.
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.
He developed the V−A theory of the weak
interaction in collaboration with Richard
Feynman. In the 1960s, he introduced current
algebra as a method of systematically exploiting
symmetries to extract predictions from quark
models, in the absence of reliable dynamical
theory. This method led to model-independent
sum rules confirmed by experiment and provided
starting points underpinning the development
of the standard theory of elementary particles.
Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed
the sigma model of pions, which describes
low-energy pion interactions. Modifying the
integer-charged quark model of Moo-Young Han
and Yoichiro Nambu, Harald Fritzsch and Gell-Mann
were the first to write down the modern accepted
theory of quantum chromodynamics, although
they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom.
In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in physics
for his contributions and discoveries concerning
the classification of elementary particles
and their interactions.
Gell-Mann is responsible, together with Pierre
Ramond and Richard Slansky, and independently
of Peter Minkowski, Rabindra Mohapatra, Goran
Senjanovic, Sheldon Lee Glashow, and Tsutomu
Yanagida, for the see-saw theory of neutrino
masses, that produces masses at the large
scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino.
He is also known to have played a large role
in keeping string theory alive through the
1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line
of research at a time when it was unpopular.
Early life and education
Gell-Mann was born in lower Manhattan into
a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. His parents were Pauline and Arthur
Isidore Gell-Mann, 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 and subsequently entered Yale at the
age of 15 as a member of Jonathan Edwards
College. At Yale, he participated in the William
Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and
was on the team representing Yale University
that won the second prize in 1947. Gell-Mann
earned a bachelor's degree in physics from
Yale University in 1948, and a PhD in physics
from MIT in 1951. Gell-Mann's advisor at MIT
was Victor Weisskopf.
Physics career
In 1958, Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, in
parallel with the independent team of George
Sudarshan and Robert Marshak, discovered the
chiral structures of the weak interaction
in physics. This work followed the experimental
discovery of the violation of parity by Chien-Shiung
Wu, as suggested by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao
Lee, theoretically.
Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s involved recently
discovered cosmic ray particles that came
to be called kaons and hyperons. Classifying
these particles led him to propose that a
quantum number called strangeness would be
conserved by the strong and the electromagnetic
interactions, but not by the weak interactions.
Another of Gell-Mann's ideas is the Gell-Mann-Okubo
formula, which was, initially, a formula based
on empirical results, but was later explained
by his quark model. Gell-Mann and Abraham
Pais were involved in explaining several puzzling
aspects of the physics of these particles.
In 1961, this led him to introduce a classification
scheme for hadrons, elementary particles that
participate in the strong interaction. This
scheme is now explained by the quark model.
Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the Eightfold
Way, because of the octets of particles in
the classification.
In 1964, Gell-Mann and, independently, George
Zweig went on to postulate the existence of
quarks, particles of which the hadrons of
this scheme are composed. The name was coined
by Gell-Mann and is a reference to the novel
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce Zweig had referred
to the particles as "aces", but Gell-Mann's
name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons
were soon established as the underlying elementary
objects in the study of the structure of hadrons.
He was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in
1969 for his contributions and discoveries
concerning the classification of elementary
particles and their interactions.
In 1972 he and Harald Fritzsch introduced
the conserved quantum number "color charge",
and later, together with Heinrich Leutwyler,
they coined the term quantum chromodynamics
as the gauge theory of the strong interaction.
The quark model is a part of QCD, and it has
been robust enough to naturally accommodate
the discovery of new "flavors" of quarks,
which superseded the eightfold way scheme.
During the 1990s, Gell-Mann's interest turned
to the emerging study of complexity. He played
a central role in the founding of the Santa
Fe Institute, where he continues to work as
a distinguished professor.
He wrote a popular science book about these
matters, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures
in the Simple and the Complex. 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, which is titled Strange Beauty:
Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century
Physics, which Dr. Gell-Mann has criticized
as inaccurate. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist
Philip Anderson, in his chapter on Gell-Mann,
says that Johnson's biography is excellent.
Both Anderson and Johnson say that Gell-Mann
is a perfectionist and that his semibiographical,
The Quark and the Jaguar is consequently incomplete.
Personal life
Gell-Mann married Marcia Southwick in 1992,
after the death of his first wife, J. Margaret
Dow, whom he married in 1955. His children
are Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann and Nicholas
Webster Gell-Mann; and he has a stepson, Nicholas
Southwick Levis.
Gell-Mann has interests in birdwatching, collecting
antiques, ranching, historical linguistics,
archaeology, natural history, the psychology
of creative thinking, other subjects connected
with biological, and cultural evolution and
with learning. Along with S. A. Starostin,
he established the Evolution of Human Languages
project at the Santa Fe Institute.
He is currently 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 is a member of the editorial board of the
Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1984 Gell-Mann
co-founded the Santa Fe Institute—a non-profit
theoretical research institute in Santa Fe,
New Mexico—to study complex systems and
disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary
study of complexity theory.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Study 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 1954-55 before moving
to the California Institute of Technology,
where he taught from 1955 until he retired
in 1993.
As a humanist and an agnostic, Gell-Mann is
a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy
of Humanism.
Gell-Mann endorsed Barack Obama for the United
States presidency in October 2008.
Awards and honors
Nobel Prize in Physics
Ernest O. Lawrence Award
Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award
Albert Einstein Medal
Yale University – D.Sc, 1959
American Physical Society – Dannie Heineman
Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1959
University of Chicago – Sc.D.(h.c.), 1967
Franklin Medal, 1967
National Academy of Sciences – John J. Carty
Award, 1968
University of Illinois – Sc.D.(h.c.), 1968
Wesleyan University – Sc.D.(h.c.), 1968
Research Corporation Award, 1969
University of Turin, Italy – Honorary Doctorate,
1969
University of Utah – Sc.D.(h.c.), 1970
Columbia University – Sc.D.(h.c.), 1977
University of Cambridge, England – Sc.D.(h.c.),
1980
United Nations Environment Programme Roll
of Honor for Environmental Achievement, 1988
World Federation of Scientists – Erice Prize,
1990
University of Oxford, England – D.Sc.(h.c.),
1992
Southern Illinois University – Sc.D.(h.c.),
1993
University of Florida – Sc.D.(h.c.), Doctorate
of Natural Resources, 1994
Southern Methodist University – Sc.D.(h.c.),
1999
American Humanist Association – Humanist
of the Year, 2005
Helmholtz-Medal of the Berlin-Brandenberg
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2014
See also
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
Quark
Gell-Mann matrices
Notes
Further reading
Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from
the Office of Scientific and Technical Information,
United States Department of Energy
Encyclopædia Britannica's Biography of Murray
Gell-Mann
Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M.; Leutwyler, H..
"Advantages of the color octet gluon picture".
Physics Letters B 47: 365–8. Bibcode:1973PhLB...47..365F.
doi:10.1016/0370-2693(73)90625-4. 
Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M.. "Current algebra-
quarks and what else?". In Jackson, J.D.;
Roberts, A.; International Union of Pure and
Applied Physics. Proceedings of the XVI International
Conference on High Energy Physics 2. National
Accelerator Laboratory. pp. 135–165. OCLC 57672574. 
Murray Gell-Mann tells his life story at Web
of Stories
Strange Beauty home page
The Making of a Physicist: A Talk With Murray
Gell-Mann
Berreby, D.. "The Man Who Knows Everything".
New York Times. 
The Man With Five Brains
The many worlds of Murray Gell-Mann
The Simple and the Complex, Part I: The Quantum
and the Quasi-Classical with Murray Gell-Mann,
Ph.D.
Nobel Prize Biography
External links
Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from
the Department of Energy, Office of Scientific
& Technical Information
Gell-Mann's Home Page at SFI
TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and
truth in physics at TED in 2007
TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor
of language at TED
Murray Gell-Mann Video Interview with the
Academy of Achievement in 1990
Murray Gell-Mann talks quarks
Murray Gell-Mann at the Mathematics Genealogy
Project
