Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019), An Obituary-Tribute

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.