Murray Gell-Mann was born
on 15th September 1929, in New York City. He obtained his B.Sc.
at Yale
University in 1948, and his Ph.D. in 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. In 1952 he became a member of the Institute for
Advanced Study, during 1952-1953 he was instructor at the
University of
Chicago, from 1953 to 1954 he was Assistant Professor, in
1954 he was appointed Associate Professor for research on
dispersion relations. In this period he developed the strangeness
theory and the eightfold way theory. In 1956 he was appointed
Professor, his research then turned more to the theory of weak
interactions.
In 1959 Professor Gell-Mann was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize
of the American Physical Society. He is a Fellow of this society
and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Murray Gell-Mann was in 1955 married to J. Margaret Dow; they
have a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, Nicholas.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1963-1970, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.
To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1969
Addendum, May 2007
Murray Gell-Mann is one of today's most prominent scientists. He is
currently Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute as well as the Robert
Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology,
where he joined the faculty in 1955. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in
Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the author
of
The Quark and the Jaguar, published in 1994, in which his ideas
on simplicity and complexity are presented to a general readership.
Among his contributions to Physics was the "eightfold way" scheme
that brought order out of the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 kinds
of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei. Gell-Mann subsequently
found that all of those particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed
of fundamental building blocks that he named "quarks," with very
unusual properties. That idea has since been fully confirmed by experiment.
The quarks are permanently confined by forces coming from the exchange of "gluons." He
and others later constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons,
called "quantum chromodynamics," which seems to account for all
the nuclear particles and their strong interactions.
Professor Gell-Mann was a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation
from 1979–2002 and is a board member of the Wildlife Conservation
Society. From 1974 to 1988, he was a Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution.
He belongs to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign
Relations; he is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He
was on the U.S. President's Science Advisory Committee from 1969 to
1972 and the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology
from 1994 to 2001.
In 1988 Professor Gell-Mann was listed on the United Nations Environmental
Program's Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500).
He also shared the 1989 Ettore Majorana "Science for Peace" prize.
Earlier, he was given the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic
Energy Commission, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research
Corporation Award, and the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of
Sciences. In 2005 Gell-Mann was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal. He has
received honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale, Columbia,
the University of Chicago, Cambridge, and Oxford. In 1994 the University of
Florida awarded him an honorary degree in Environmental Studies.
Gell-Mann's interests extend to historical linguistics, archeology,
natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected
with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his recent
research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive
systems, which brings many of those topics together. Currently Professor Gell-Mann
is spearheading the Evolution of Human Languages Program at the Santa Fe Institute.
Another focus of his work relates to simplicity, complexity, regularity, and
randomness. He is also concerned with how knowledge and understanding are
to be extracted from the welter of "information" that can now
be transmitted and stored as a result of the digital revolution. Professor
Gell-Mann lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and he teaches from time to time at
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
