September 15, 1929, New York (United States) – May 24, 2019, Santa Fe (United States)
Of immigrant Jewish parents from the then Austro-Hungarian Empire (from a region that is currently part of Ukraine), since childhood he has shown his abilities in mathematics.
He studied Physics at Yale University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and contributed from a very young age to research related to the use of particle accelerators, machines that collide protons and electrons at high speeds to decipher their components.
It was at this stage that he co-authored a study with the physicist Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his quantum theory of electromagnetic fields.
From 1955 he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) and, from 1967, he taught theoretical physics.
In 1961, Gell-Mann and Yuval Neieman independently proposed a scheme for arranging into groups of eight and ten the more than 100 elementary particles predicted by mathematical theories or observed in experiments with particle accelerators to be inside the atomic nucleus. The "Eightfold Way" or eightfold path, which Gell-Mann called poetically the eightfold path of Buddhism, the path that leads to enlightenment.
His theory brought order to the chaos that arose when particles were discovered, and his system classified subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons, mesons, and baryons, into groups with similar and related properties. This not only helped to describe the interactions between the particles but also made it possible to predict the existence of others not yet known.
Since 1964 he has been a member of NASA.
In 1969, he received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries on elementary particles.
Based on his system, Gell-Mann predicted the existence of another hypothetical particle composed of protons and neutrons, called a quark. These are held together thanks to the exchange of gluons (gluon in English is "glue", it is the carrier boson of the strong nuclear interaction, one of the four fundamental forces together with the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational interaction). Along with other researchers, he built the quantum theory of quarks and gluons, called "Quantum Chromodynamics."
He was the one who gave the name to the quark taken from the comic novel "Finnegans Wake" by Irish author James Joyce, which took 17 years to write and is characterized by its experimental style and its reputation for being one of the most difficult works to understand. of English literature. In it, quark refers to the onomatopoeia of a seagull cry and is associated with Three (three in English), very appropriate because at that time only three types of quarks were known.
In 1994, he published the book "The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simplex and the Complex" for the general public, explaining why he chose the term.
The existence of the particle was verified years later in experiments with particle accelerators.
He has also received the Albert Einstein Medal, an award given annually by the Albert Einstein Society in Bern (Switzerland) to people who have provided services in connection with Albert Einstein.
Throughout his career, he has taught at different institutions such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago.
In addition to science, Glenn-Mann was interested in other fields such as literature, natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, and psychology. For this reason, he was a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Physical Society, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association for the Advance Science JASON.
