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Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist.
Murray Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
He introduced the "eightfold way" as a means to coherently organize the great numbers of particles that had been found by experimentalists in prior years.
The eightfold way establishes a clear link between quark arrangements and abstract algebra. The algebra that Gell-Mann used to express the relationship is called the SU(3).
Gell-Mann was also instrumental in the development of the idea of quarks; the conservation of strangeness (a quantity that quarks intrisically possess based on their type) under interaction with the Strong nuclear force, and the fact that they possess charges of ±1/3 or ±2/3. The interactions of quarks and gluons with the strong nuclear force is governed by a theory called Quantum Chromodynamics
Gell-Mann wrote a popular science book, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. George Johnson wrote the major popular biography of Gell-Mann, which is entitled Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics.
He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1948, and a PhD in physics from MIT in 1951. In 1984 Gell-Mann founded the Santa Fe Institute—a non-profit research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico—to study complex systems and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of complexity theory.
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