Murray Gell-Mann Facts

Murray Gell-Mann Facts
Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the classification of subatomic particles. He was the first to identify flavor symmetry of hadrons.
Interesting Murray Gell-Mann Facts:
He was born in lower Manhattan to Jewish immigrants.
He valedictorian of his class at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School and entered Yale University at 15.
In 1947 he was on the team that won second prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.
He received his BS from Yale in 1948 and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951.
In 1952 he introduced the quantum concept of strangeness which describes the decay patterns of mesons.
In 1958 he and Richard Feynman discovered the chiral structures of the weak nuclear force in physics.
He studied cosmic ray particles and he believed that a quantum number would not be conserved by weak interactions.
In 1961 he introduced a classification for hadrons.
In 1964 he proposed the existence of quarks and took the name from the book, Finnegan's Wake.
His Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions".
In 1984 he helped found the Santa Fe Institute to support research into complex adaptive systems and complexity.
It was at the Santa Fe Institute that he established the Evolution of Human Language project.
He is also a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
He has received many awards in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Ernest O. Lawrence Award in 1966, Albert Einstein Medal in 2005, Franklin Medal in 1967 and the Erice Prize from the World Federation of Scientists in 1990.
He had numerous honorary degrees from universities in the US and abroad.


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