Biography

Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929 in New York City, New York, USA. He was married to Marcia Southwick and J. Margaret Dow. He died on May 24, 2019 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

Theoretical physicist, 1969 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Professor Gell-Mann's "eightfold way" theory brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 particles in the atom's nucleus. Then he found that all of those particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named "quarks."

He was the youngest son of Jewish immigrants from Austria.

He began studying at Yale when he was 15. He considered majoring in archaeology or linguistics, but his father suggested engineering because it would help him get a job; they compromised on physics. He graduated from Yale at age 18. He earned his doctorate in physics at MIT at age 21.

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.