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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 25 2019, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-stand-on-the-shoulders-of-giants dept.

Nobel prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann has died.

A polymath who discovered and organized the tiniest building blocks of matter and went on to study the most complex systems in the universe, Gell-Mann died Friday at the age of 89.

"Much of what we currently understand about particle physics was invented by Murray Gell-Mann," says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, where Gell-Mann taught for decades. "He was a towering influence in the field."

The New York Times has his obituary


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Hartree on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:44AM (1 child)

    by Hartree (195) on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:44AM (#847825)

    He took a professorship at University of New Mexico when I was there. He was doing a lot of work with Santa Fe Institute on complexity, so having a position nearby was useful to him. UNM Physics got to have a Nobel prize winner (great for promoting the department). He didn't interact much with us mortals and his office was in some administration building rather than the physics building.

    What little I interacted with him he seemed OK. Then again, I was a solid state type and there was that infamous "squalid state" remark of his. ;)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:17PM (#847911)

    Solid state is practically an engineering field, so theoreticians look at you like math people look at physics people.