The Chemical Educator
ISSN: 1430-4171 (electronic version)
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Contents
Abstract Volume 24
(2019) pp 120-122
Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019), An Obituary-Tribute
George B. Kauffman*
Department of Chemistry, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740-8034, georgek@mail.fresnostate.edu
Published: 30 September
2019
Abstract. Murray Gell-Mann, an American physicist, died
in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 89. At the time of his death he was the
Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Physics at the California Institute of
Technology and University Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the Presidential Professor of
Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. He had received
the 1969 Nobel Physics Prize “for his contributions and discoveries concerning
the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.” During the 1950s and 1960s new accelerators and
apparatuses helped identify many new elementary particles. In theoretical works
from the same period Murray Gell-Mann classified particles and their
interactions, proposing that observed particles are composite, i.e., comprised of smaller building blocks called quarks. According to this theory,
as-yet-undiscovered particles should exist. When these were later discovered
experimentally, the theory was accepted. Gell-Mann was born in lower Manhattan,
New York City on September 15, 1929. His family was Jewish immigrants from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire (Chernivtsi, Czernowitz) in present day Ukraine. His
parents were Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann, who taught English as a second language
and Pauline Gell-Mann (née Reichstein). He earned his B.S. degree in physics
from Yale University in 1948 and PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute Of
Technology (MIT) in 1951. He married J. Margaret Dow in 1955 (She died in
1981). He married Marcia Southwick in 1992. He had two children.
Key Words: Chemistry and History; Nobel Prize; Physics; Quarks; Theory of Elementary Particles; Effective Complexity; Gell-Mann and Low Theorem; Gell-Mann Matrices: Strangeness; Gell-Mann–Nishijima Formula; Gell-Mann –Okubo-Mass Formula; Crossing Symmetry
(*) Corresponding author.
(E-mail: georgek@mail.fresnostate.edu)
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