GellMann
Gell-Mann, Murray (1929–2019) was an American theoretical physicist known for foundational work in the classification of elementary particles and the development of the quark model. He coined the term quark, drawing it from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and he proposed that hadrons are composed of more fundamental constituents called quarks. In 1964 he introduced the eightfold way, organizing hadrons into multiplets using SU(3) flavor symmetry, which provided a powerful framework for understanding particle spectra.
Among his key conceptual contributions were the introduction of the quantum number strangeness to explain the
Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions to the theory of
In addition to his technical work, Gell-Mann authored books and essays on physics and complexity, and he