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
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hartree on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:44AM (1 child)
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. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:17PM
Solid state is practically an engineering field, so theoreticians look at you like math people look at physics people.