Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) and His Science

Murray Gell-Mann was among the very eminent and influential physicists of the second half of the 20th century. He was born in New York City on 15 September 1929. He graduated from Columbia Grammar School at the age of 14 and got his undergraduate degree from Yale at 18. Gell-Mann obtained his doctorate degree from MIT, under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf, in just two and a half years. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1951 where he worked with Francis Low. During 1952–54, he was briefly on the faculty of the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi and Marvin Goldberger. He joined Caltech in 1955 as an associate professor on the recommendation of Richard Feynman, where he continued until retirement in 1993 as Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics. 1993 onwards he remained the R. A. Millikan Professor Emeritus at Caltech and distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 ‘for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions’. His students include Sydney Coleman, James Hartle, Kenneth G. Wilson, Christopher T. Hill and Barton Zweibach. He passed away in Santa Fe on 24 May 2019.