Gell-Mann, << gehl mahn, >> Murray (1929-2019), an American physicist, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in classifying subatomic particles and their interactions. During the 1950’s, physicists discovered many of the elementary particles that make up matter but had no way to classify them. In 1953, Gell-Mann proposed the concept of strangeness, which explained why certain subatomic particles did not decay (change into other particles) as quickly as expected. In 1961, Gell-Mann proposed his eightfold way, in which he classified subatomic particles into families. An Israeli physicist, Yuval Ne’eman, independently arrived at the same idea. Using the theory, Gell-Mann predicted the existence of an elementary particle called omega-minus. In 1964, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found this particle.
Gell-Mann was born on Sept. 15, 1929, in New York City. He received a Ph.D. in 1951 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1955, he became a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology. Gell-Mann died on May 24, 2019.
