Jerome Isaac Friedman

Friedman tied the nuptial knot with Tania Letetsky-Baranovsky in 1956. The couple has been blessed with four children, Ellena, Joel, Martin, and Sandra.

Jerome Isaac Friedman was born on March 28, 1930 to Lillian and Selig Friedman in Chicago, Illinois. He was the second of the two children born to the couple. His parents were Jewish who had immigrated to USA from Russia.

As a child, young Friedman was deeply encouraged to study by his parents, who were devoted learners. Though less educated, his parents desired their children to have a steady formal education. Consequently, young Friedman gained his primary and secondary education from Chicago. He excelled in arts and aimed to make a career in the same.

It was a book by Einstein titled ‘Relativity’ that developed Friedman’s interest in science, especially physics. Originally fascinated by art, he gave up on his scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum School to satiate his curiosity of the physical world.

Friedman enrolled at the University of Chicago on a full scholarship. Post fulfilling the requirements in a highly innovative and intellectually stimulating liberal arts program, he gained admission in the Physics Department in 1950.

In 1953, he received his Master's degree and three years later, a Ph.D under the guidance of Enrico Ferni.

Upon completing his PhD, Friedman started working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s nuclear emulsion laboratory under Valentine Telegdi. Together the two conducted emulsion experiment searching for parity violation in muon decay.

In 1957, Friedman found work with Robert Hofstadter. He joined the latter’s group at the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford University as a Research Associate. While working, he befriended Henry Kendall, a friendship that turned into a long time collaboration

At SLAC, Friedman learned counter physics and the techniques of electron scattering. He conducted several experiments on elastic and inelastic electrondeuteron scattering. He even developed a technique of making radiative corrections to inelastic spectra.

In 1960, Friedman was offered a position as a faculty member in the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He soon accepted a position at Stanford University, where he made a collaborative effort to measure muon pair production at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA) in order to test the validity of Quantum Electro-Dynamics.

In 1961, Kendall joined Friedman’s group as did other physicists such as WKH Panofsky, Richard Taylor and so on. The group started developing electron scattering facilities for a physics program at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Friedman’s main achievements came during 1967-1975 when he conducted a series of experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Through the experiment, Friedman, Taylor and Kendall studied how electrons scattered during the collisions and how protons were sometimes converted into other particles. Their results supported the theory that protons and neutrons are composed of sub-particles, quarks.