Murray Gell-Mann

@Yale University, Family and Personal Life

Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the classification of subatomic particles

Sep 15, 1929

AmericanMassachusetts Institute Of TechnologyYale UniversityScientistsPhysicistsVirgo Celebrities
Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: September 15, 1929
  • Nationality: American
  • Famous: Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Yale University, Scientists, Physicists
  • Spouses: J. Margaret Dow (m. 1955; her death 1981) Marcia Southwick
  • Known as: Murray Gell-mann
  • Childrens: Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann, Nicholas Southwick Levis, Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann
  • Universities:
    • Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT),Yale University
    • 1951 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Yale University
    • Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School

Murray Gell-Mann born at

Manhattan, New York City, U.S.

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Birth Place

In 1955, Gell-Mann married British archeologist J. Margaret Dow. The couple had two children, a daughter, Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann and a son, Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann. Margaret died in 1981.

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Personal Life

In 1992, Gell-Mann married Marcia Southwick. He has a stepson named Nicholas Southwick Levis from this union. He now lives in Santa Fe.

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Personal Life

Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929 in New York City into a family of Jewish immigrants. They had their original home in Czernowitz, an ancient city inthe Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is now known as Chernivtsi and is part of Ukraine.

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Childhood & Early Life

His father, Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann taught English as Second Language. His mother’s name was Pauline (née Reichstein) Gell-Mann. Although they had to struggle hard during the Great Depression, Arthur made sure that his son had proper education.

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Childhood & Early Life

Murray had his schooling at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. As a child, he was greatly interested in mathematics. Over the time, he began to grow a wide range of interest. However, he did not like physics at school and this was only subject, in which he always received poor grades.

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Childhood & Early Life

Nonetheless, Murray graduated from CGPS as class valedictorian at the age of 15 and won a scholarship to Yale University. Although at that time, his interest lay in archeology and linguistics his father urged him to take up science.

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Childhood & Early Life

Ultimately, he enrolled at Jonathon Edwards College at Yale and whimsically chose physics as his major. He was very soon captivated by the subject. In 1947, he took part in William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and came out second.

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Childhood & Early Life

In 1952, he joined Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago as an instructor in physics. He was promoted to the post of Assistant Professor in 1953 and an Associate Professor in 1954.

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Career

During this period, Gell-Mann mainly worked on the cosmic ray particles like kaons and hyperons. These particles, which had recently been discovered, behaved rather strangely. For example, many of these new particles decayed more slowly and the physicists could not explain the reason.

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Career

To explain such phenomenon, Gell-Mann introduced his concept of ‘strangeness’. It is a quantum property, which accounted for the decay pattern of certain mesons. Incidentally, Japanese physicist Kazuhiko Nishijima also worked independently on the same problem and came to the same conclusion almost at the same time.

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Career

In 1955, Gell-Mann joined California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena as a member of faculty and was promoted to the post of a full professor within a short period. At the age of thirty he was the youngest person to hold such post in the history of the Institute.

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Career

In and around that time, around one hundred new particles had been discovered in the nuclei of an atom. The characteristics and behaviors puzzled the physicists to such an extent that some began to refer to them as ‘particle zoo’.

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Career

The concept of ‘strangeness’ is one of Gell-Mann’s most important contributions to science. He suggested that when a sub-atomic particle interacts by means of a strong electromagnetic force the strangeness is conserved. He suggested that these particles be given strangeness numbers so that they could be evaluated properly.

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Major Works

The ‘Eightfold Way’ is another of Gell-Man’s important contributions to science. Through this concept Gell-Mann organized the newly discovered subatomic baryons and mesons into octets and paved the way for further study.

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Major Works