Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

who received the 1969

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the

Robert Andrews Millikan Robert Andrews Millikan (March 22, 1868 – December 19, 1953) was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric ...

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 The University of New Mexico (UNM; es, Universidad de Nuevo México) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 1889, it is the state's flagship academic institution and the largest by enrollment, with over 25,400 ...

, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

. Gell-Mann spent several periods at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowships to professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ...

fellow in 1972.

Early life and education

Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

immigrants from the

Austro-Hungarian Empire Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...

. His parents were Pauline (née Reichstein) and Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann, who taught English as a second language. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature and mathematics, he graduated

valedictorian Valedictorian is an academic title for the highest-performing student of a graduating class of an academic institution. The valedictorian is commonly determined by a numerical formula, generally an academic institution's grade point average (GPA) ...

from the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School aged 14 and subsequently entered

Yale College Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, ...

as a member of Jonathan Edwards College. At Yale, he participated in the

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada (regar ...

and was on the team representing

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...

(along with

Murray Gerstenhaber Murray Gerstenhaber (born June 5, 1927) is an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for his contributions to theoretical physics with his discovery of Gerstenhaber algebra. He is also a ...

and Henry O. Pollak) that won the second prize in 1947. Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics. He sought to remain in the

Ivy League The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The term ''Ivy League'' is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight school ...

for his graduate education and applied to

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

as well as

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

. He 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. He was accepted by the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

(MIT) 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, Gell-Mann was "miserable" with the fact that he would not be able to attend Princeton or Harvard and considered suicide. He stated that he realized he could try to first enter MIT and commit suicide afterwards if he found it to be truly terrible. However, he couldn't first choose suicide and then attend MIT; the two "didn't commute", as Gell-Mann said. Gell-Mann received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1951 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Coupling strength and nuclear reactions", under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf.

Career

Gell-Mann was a postdoctoral fellow at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

in 1951, and a visiting research professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

from 1952 to 1953. He was a visiting associate professor at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

and an associate professor at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1954–1955 before moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until he retired in 1993.

Nuclear physics

In 1958, Gell-Mann in collaboration with Richard Feynman, in parallel with the independent team of

E. C. George Sudarshan Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan (also known as E. C. G. Sudarshan; 16 September 1931 – 13 May 2018) was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contrib ...

and Robert Marshak, discovered the chiral structures of the weak interaction of physics and developed the V-A theory (vector minus axial vector theory). This work followed the experimental discovery of the violation of parity by

Chien-Shiung Wu ) , spouse = , residence = , nationality = ChineseAmerican , field = Physics , work_institutions = Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica University of California at Berkeley Smith College Princeton University Columbia UniversityZhejiang ...

, as suggested by Chen-Ning Yang and

Tsung-Dao Lee Tsung-Dao Lee (; born November 24, 1926) is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee–Yang theorem, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons, and soliton stars ...

, theoretically. Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s involved recently discovered

cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

particles that came to be called kaons and

hyperon In particle physics, a hyperon is any baryon containing one or more strange quarks, but no charm, bottom, or top quark. This form of matter may exist in a stable form within the core of some neutron stars. Hyperons are sometimes generically rep ...

s. Classifying these particles led him to propose that a

quantum number In quantum physics and chemistry, quantum numbers describe values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of a quantum system. Quantum numbers correspond to eigenvalues of operators that commute with the Hamiltonian—quantities that can ...

called

strangeness In particle physics, strangeness ("''S''") is a property of particles, expressed as a quantum number, for describing decay of particles in strong and electromagnetic interactions which occur in a short period of time. The strangeness of a parti ...

would be conserved by the strong and the electromagnetic interactions, but not by the weak interactions. ( Kazuhiko Nishijima arrived at this idea independently, calling the quantity

\eta

-charge after the eta meson. ) Another of Gell-Mann's ideas is the Gell-Mann–Okubo formula, which was, initially, a formula based on empirical results, but was later explained by his

quark model In particle physics, the quark model is a classification scheme for hadrons in terms of their valence quarks—the quarks and antiquarks which give rise to the quantum numbers of the hadrons. The quark model underlies "flavor SU(3)", or the Ei ...

. Gell-Mann and Abraham Pais were involved in explaining the puzzling aspect of the neutral kaon mixing. Murray Gell-Mann's fortunate encounter with mathematician

Richard Earl Block Richard Earl Block (born 1931) is a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside who works on Lie algebras over fields of prime characteristic. Block earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956 under the supervision of Abr ...

at Caltech, in the fall of 1960, "enlightened" him to introduce a novel classification scheme, in 1961, for

hadron In particle physics, a hadron (; grc, ἁδρός, hadrós; "stout, thick") is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the ...

s. A similar scheme had been independently proposed by

Yuval Ne'eman Yuval Ne'eman ( he, יובל נאמן, 14 May 1925 – 26 April 2006) was an Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. He was Minister of Science and Development in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was the President o ...

, and is now explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the '' eightfold way'', because of the ''octets'' of particles in the classification (the term is a reference to the Eightfold Path of

Buddhism Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

). Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed the

sigma model In physics, a sigma model is a field theory that describes the field as a point particle confined to move on a fixed manifold. This manifold can be taken to be any Riemannian manifold, although it is most commonly taken to be either a Lie group or ...

of pions, which describes low-energy pion interactions. In 1964, Gell-Mann and, independently, George Zweig went on to postulate the existence of

quark A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly ...

s, particles of which the

s of this scheme are composed. The name was coined by Gell-Mann and is a reference to the novel '' Finnegans Wake'', by

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...

("Three quarks for Muster Mark!" book 2, episode 4). Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces", but Gell-Mann's name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons were soon established as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. He was awarded a

in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions. In the 1960s, he introduced current algebra as a method of systematically exploiting symmetries to extract predictions from quark models, in the absence of reliable dynamical theory. This method led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment and provided starting points underpinning the development of the

Standard Model The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces ( electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions - excluding gravity) in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It ...

(SM), the widely accepted theory of elementary particles. In 1972 he and

Harald Fritzsch Harald Fritzsch (born 10 February 1943 in Zwickau, Germany, died 16 August 2022 in München) was a German theoretical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of quarks, the development of Quantum Chromodynamics and the great unific ...

introduced the conserved quantum number " color charge", and later, together with Heinrich Leutwyler, they coined the term

quantum chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type ...

(QCD) as the

gauge theory In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations ( Lie grou ...

of the strong interaction. The

is a part of QCD, and it has been robust enough to accommodate in a natural fashion the discovery of new "

flavors Flavor or flavour is either the sensory perception of taste or smell, or a flavoring in food that produces such perception. Flavor or flavour may also refer to: Science *Flavors (programming language), an early object-oriented extension to Li ...

" of quarks, which superseded the eightfold way scheme. Gell-Mann was responsible, together with Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky,M. Gell-Mann, P. Ramond and R. Slansky, in ''Supergravity'', ed. by D. Freedman and P. Van Nieuwenhuizen, North Holland, Amsterdam (1979), pp. 315–321. and independently of Peter Minkowski, Rabindra Mohapatra, Goran Senjanović, 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. He is also known to have played a role in keeping

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...

alive through the 1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was a topic of niche interest.

Complexity science and popular writing

At the time of his death, 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

Albuquerque, New Mexico Albuquerque ( ; ), ; kee, Arawageeki; tow, Vakêêke; zun, Alo:ke:k'ya; apj, Gołgéeki'yé. abbreviated ABQ, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Its nicknames, The Duke City and Burque, both reference its founding i ...

, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the

. He was a member of the editorial board of the ''

Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...

''. In 1984 Gell-Mann was one of several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute—a non-profit theoretical research institute in

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label= Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. The name “S ...

intended to study various aspects of a

complex system A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication sy ...

and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of

complexity Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence. The term is generally used to ch ...

theory.

He wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, ''The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex'' (1994). The title of the book is taken from a line of a poem by

Arthur Sze Arthur Sze (; ; born December 1, 1950) is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection ''Compass Rose'' (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sz ...

: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night". The author George Johnson has written a

biography A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or c ...

of Gell-Mann, ''Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics'' (1999), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Gell-Mann himself criticized ''Strange Beauty'' for some inaccuracies, with one interviewer reporting him wincing at the mention of it. In a review in the Caltech magazine ''Engineering & Science,'' Gell-Mann's colleague, the physicist

David Goodstein David Louis Goodstein (born April 5, 1939) is an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice- provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as ...

, wrote: "I don't envy Murray the weird experience of reading so penetrating and perceptive a biography of himself. . . George Johnson has written a fine biography of this important and complex man". Physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, called the book "a masterpiece of scientific explication for the layman" and a "must read" in a review for the '' Times Higher Education Supplement'' and in his chapter on Gell-Mann from a 2011 book.Philip Anderson, ''More and Different'', Chapter V, World Scientific, 2011. Sheldon Glashow, another Nobel laureate, gave ''Strange Beauty'' a generally positive review while noting some inaccuracies, and physicist and science historian Silvan S. Schweber called the book "an elegant biography of one of the outstanding theorists of the twentieth century" though he noted that Johnson did not go into depth about Gell-Mann's work with military–industrial organizations like the

Institute for Defense Analyses The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) is an American non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) – the Systems and Analyses Center (SAC), the Science and Technology Policy Institute ...

. Johnson has written that Gell-Mann was a perfectionist and that ''The Quark and the Jaguar'' was consequently submitted late and incomplete. In an item on Edge.org, Johnson described the back story of his relationship with Gell-Mann and noted that an errata sheet appears on the biography's webpage. Gell-Mann's one-time Caltech associate Stephen Wolfram called Johnson's book "a very good biography of Murray, which Murray hated". Wolfram also wrote that Gell-Mann thought the writing of ''The Quark and the Jaguar'' to be responsible for a heart attack he (Gell-Mann) had had. In 2012 Gell-Mann and his companion Mary McFadden published the book ''Mary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure''.

Quantum foundations

Gell-Mann was a proponent of the

consistent histories In quantum mechanics, the consistent histories (also referred to as decoherent histories) approach is intended to give a modern interpretation of quantum mechanics, generalising the conventional Copenhagen interpretation and providing a natural i ...

approach to understanding quantum mechanics, which he advocated in papers with James Hartle.

Personal life

Gell-Mann married J. Margaret Dow in 1955; they had a daughter and a son. Margaret died in 1981, and in 1992 he married Marcia Southwick, whose son became his stepson. Gell-Mann's interests outside of physics included

archaeology Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landsc ...

numismatics Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, medals and related objects. Specialists, known as numismatists, are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, but the discipline also inc ...

, birdwatching and

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

. Along with S. A. Starostin, he established the Evolution of Human Languages project at the Santa Fe Institute. As a humanist and an

agnostic Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable. (page 56 in 1967 edition) Another definition provided is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficien ...

, Gell-Mann was a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism. Novelist

Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., July 20, 1933) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He is known for his g ...

saw Gell-Mann as a polymath who "knew more things about more things than anyone I've ever met...losing Murray is like losing the

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

Awards and honors

Gell-Mann won numerous awards and honours including the following: * 1959 – Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics * 1960 – Elected member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

* 1962 – American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award * 1964 – Elected member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

* 1966 –

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of a scientist who helped elevate American physics to the status of world leader in the field. E. O. Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an accelerator of subatomic part ...

* 1967 –

Franklin Medal The Franklin Medal was a science award presented from 1915 until 1997 by the Franklin Institute located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. It was founded in 1914 by Samuel Insull. The Franklin Medal was the most prestigious of the various awar ...

* 1968 –

– John J. Carty Award * 1969 –

Research Corporation Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) is an organization in the United States devoted to the advancement of science, funding research projects in the physical sciences. Since 1912, Research Corporation for Science Advancement has id ...

Award * 1969 –

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...

in Physics * 1978 – Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) * 1988 –

United Nations Environment Programme The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is responsible for coordinating responses to environmental issues within the United Nations system. It was established by Maurice Strong, its first director, after the United Nations Conference on ...

Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500) * 1993 – Elected member of The American Philosophical Society * 2005 –

Albert Einstein Medal The Albert Einstein Medal is an award presented by the Albert Einstein Society in Bern. First given in 1979, the award is presented to people for "scientific findings, works, or publications related to Albert Einstein" each year. Recipients S ...

* 2005 –

American Humanist Association The American Humanist Association (AHA) is a non-profit organization in the United States that advances secular humanism. The American Humanist Association was founded in 1941 and currently provides legal assistance to defend the constituti ...

– Humanist of the Year * 2014 – Helmholtz-Medal of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities Press Release, 10–2014, from Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Retrieved February 15, 2017 Universities that gave Gell-Mann

honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

s include

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

Columbia Columbia may refer to: * Columbia (personification), the historical female national personification of the United States, and a poetic name for America Places North America Natural features * Columbia Plateau, a geologic and geographic region i ...

, the

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

and

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

References

External links

* * *
"Beauty, truth and ... physics?" (TED2007)
*
"The ancestor of language" (TED2007)

Murray Gell-Mann Video Interview with the Academy of Achievement
in 1990
Murray Gell-Mann talks quarks (Video)

Membership
at the

Council on Foreign Relations The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Founded in 1921, it is a nonprofit organization that is independent and nonpartisan. CFR is based in New York Ci ...

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gell-Mann, Murray 1929 births 2019 deaths Nobel laureates in Physics American Nobel laureates Albert Einstein Medal recipients American agnostics American humanists American people of Austrian-Jewish descent American people of Romanian-Jewish descent 21st-century American physicists Jewish American physicists California Institute of Technology faculty Complex systems scientists Fellows of Pakistan Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Columbia University faculty Foreign Members of the Royal Society Foreign Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Foreign Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy Jewish agnostics Jewish humanists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Particle physicists People from Manhattan People from Santa Fe, New Mexico American systems scientists Theoretical physicists Wesleyan University people Yale College alumni Members of JASON (advisory group) People associated with CERN Santa Fe Institute people Scientists from New York City Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School alumni MIT Department of Physics alumni Long-range comparative linguists University of New Mexico faculty Members of the American Philosophical Society