23 Facts About Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.

Murray Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Murray Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine.

Murray Gell-Mann's parents were Pauline and Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann, who taught English as a second language.

Murray Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics.

Murray Gell-Mann sought to remain in the Ivy League for his graduate education and applied to Princeton University as well as Harvard University.

Murray Gell-Mann was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution was unable to offer him any of the financial assistance that he needed.

Murray Gell-Mann was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a letter from Victor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant, which would provide Gell-Mann with the financial assistance he needed.

Unaware of MIT's eminent status in physics research, Murray Gell-Mann was "miserable" with the fact that he would not be able to attend Princeton or Harvard and considered suicide.

Murray Gell-Mann stated that he realized he could try to first enter MIT and commit suicide afterwards if he found it to be truly terrible.

Murray Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the eightfold way, because of the octets of particles in the classification.

The name "quark" was coined by Murray Gell-Mann, and is a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce.

Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces", but Murray Gell-Mann's name caught on.

Murray Gell-Mann was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.

Murray Gell-Mann was responsible, together with Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky, and independently of Peter Minkowski, Rabindra Mohapatra, Goran Senjanovic, Sheldon Glashow, and Tsutomu Yanagida, for the seesaw theory of neutrino masses, that produces masses at the large scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino.

Murray Gell-Mann is known to have played a role in keeping string theory alive through the 1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was a topic of niche interest.

At the time of his death, Murray Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at California Institute of Technology as well as a University Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Murray Gell-Mann wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.

Murray Gell-Mann himself criticized Strange Beauty for some inaccuracies, with one interviewer reporting him wincing at the mention of it.

Johnson has written that Murray Gell-Mann was a perfectionist and that The Quark and the Jaguar was consequently submitted late and incomplete.

Wolfram wrote that Murray Gell-Mann thought the writing of The Quark and the Jaguar to be responsible for a heart attack he had had.

Murray Gell-Mann was a proponent of the consistent histories approach to understanding quantum mechanics, which he advocated in papers with James Hartle.

Murray Gell-Mann died on May 24,2019, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.