Bookstore Glossary Library Links News Publications Timeline Virtual Israel Experience
Anti-Semitism Biography History Holocaust Israel Israel Education Myths & Facts Politics Religion Travel US & Israel Vital Stats Women
donate subscribe Contact About Home

Murray Gell-Mann

(1929 - )

Murray Gell-Mann is a Jewish American physicist who was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Gell-Man (born September 15, 1929) was born in New York City into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire. A child prodigy who taught himself calculus at age 7, Gell-Man entered Yale University at age 15 and was part of the Yale team that won second prize in 1947 at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. He graduated from Yale in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in physics and earned his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1951.

Gell-Man has served on the faculties of Chicago University, Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology. During his tenure, he studied and clarified the puzzling phenomenon of elementary subatomic particles, classifying them as “quarks” within an ordering system he called the Eightfold Way. The achievement earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.


Sources: Dor LeDor; Wikipedia