Leon M. Lederman

Lederman is married twice. His first wife was Florence Gordon with whom he has three children, two daughters, and a son. His daughter Rena is an anthropologist, daughter Rachel is a lawyer, and his son Jesse is an investment banker.

After parting ways with Florence, he married Ellen Carr. The couple resides at the Fermilab Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

Recently, he has been suffering from dementia. To cover his treatment costs, he put up his Nobel Prize for auction which was then sold for US$765,000.

Leon Max Lederman was born on July 15, 1922, in New York City. His parents, Minna Rosenberg and Morris Lederman, were Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father was a laundryman.

The young Lederman was educated at James Monroe High School in the South Bronx. He graduated from City College of New York in 1943 with a BS in Chemistry.

He completed his Master’s in 1948 with his Ph.D. in 1951 from Columbia University. His subject of choice, this time, was Physics. For his Ph.D., he worked on Columbia's “NEVIS synchro-cyclotron”, a powerful particle accelerator.

Before he began his Master’s, Leon Lederman served in the U.S. army for three years and participated in World War II. He became a 2nd Lieutenant in the Signal Corps.

After receiving his doctorate, he stayed on at Columbia University eventually becoming ‘Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics’ in 1958. He continued in this role for 28 years, albeit, taking time off for his research.

He became a Ford Foundation fellow at Geneva’s CERN where he was part of the group that conducted the “g-2” experiment. Many CERN scientists including Georges Charpak, F.J.M Farley, and E. Picasso were part of the experiment which went on for about 19 years.

From 1961 to 1978, he served as the Director of the Nevis Labs at Columbia. He mentored over 50 Ph.D. scholars many of whom became professors and physicists. None of these students, he jokingly mentions, is in jail.

He has been a guest scientist at many labs with a majority of his work being conducted at Nevis, Brookhaven, CERN, and Fermilab.

As a particle physicist, he was instrumental in the discovery of the ‘muon neutrino’” and the ‘bottom quark’ in 1962 and 1977 respectively. These discoveries cemented his reputation as a top-notch physicist.

The discovery of the muon neutrino led to his study on neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons. This would become his Nobel Prize winning research.

As an author, he penned his most famous book, ‘The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?’ in 1993. It still stands one among the best books on science.