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Leon M. Lederman

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Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.<ref name="Nobel_biography">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

An accomplished scientific writer, he became known for his 1993 book The God Particle establishing the popularity of the term for the Higgs boson.

Early life and educationEdit

Lederman was born in New York City, New York, to Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman.<ref name="HoddesonKolb2009">Template:Cite book</ref> His parents were Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants from Kyiv and Odesa.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lederman graduated from James Monroe High School in the South Bronx,<ref name="Nobelprize">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943.<ref name=Army/>

Lederman enlisted in the United States Army<ref name=Army>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> during World War II, intending to become a physicist after his service.<ref name="autogenerated5">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp Following his discharge in 1946, he enrolled at Columbia University's graduate school, receiving his Ph.D. in 1951.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Academic careerEdit

Lederman became a faculty member at Columbia University, and he was promoted to full professor in 1958 as Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics.<ref name="autogenerated5" />Template:Rp In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent time at CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name=Columbia /> He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab.<ref name=ferm>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Resigning from Columbia (and retiring from Fermilab) in 1989, he then taught briefly at the University of Chicago.<ref name=UCO>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Pritzker Professor of Science.<ref name=UCO/> In 1992, Lederman served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.<ref name=AIP>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lederman served as president of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was chair emeritus.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a member of the JASON defense advisory group.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Lederman was also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement.<ref name="First" /> Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.<ref name="First">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Lederman was an early supporter of Science Debate 2008, an initiative to get the then-candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engaged in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lederman was also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Academic workEdit

In 1956, Lederman worked on parity violation in weak interactions. R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified the parity violation.<ref> Template:Cite journal</ref> They delayed publication of their results until after Wu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back-to-back in the same physics journal. Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977.<ref name=nyto/> These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.<ref name=nyto/>

In 1976, a group of physicists, the E288 experiment team, led by Lederman announced that a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV was being produced by the Fermilab particle accelerator. After taking further data, the group discovered that this particle did not actually exist, and the "discovery" was named "Oops-Leon" as a pun on the original name, upsilon, and Lederman's first name. The name was reused for the upsilon meson, which the group discovered from subsequent data in 1977 at a higher mass of 9.5 GeV.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

As the director of Fermilab, Lederman was a prominent supporter<ref name="SSC LA Times">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="HoddesonKolb2003">Template:Cite journal</ref> of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.<ref name="Illinois Issues 1987">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Caltech">Template:Cite journal</ref> Also at Fermilab, he oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, for decades the world's highest-energy particle collider.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lederman later wrote his 1993 popular science book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? – which sought to promote awareness of the significance of such a project – in the context of the project's last years and the changing political climate of the 1990s.<ref name="Calder 2005">Template:Cite book</ref> The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditures.<ref name="SSC LA Times" /> In The God Particle he wrote, "The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects" while stressing the importance of the Higgs boson.<ref name="autogenerated5" />Template:Rp<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 1988, Lederman received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino".<ref name=Nobel_biography/> Lederman also received the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliott Cresson Medal for Physics (1976), the Wolf Prize for Physics (1982) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1992).<ref name=nyto/> In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Science Medicine and Technology.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Personal lifeEdit

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Lederman in May 2007

Lederman's best friend during his college years, Martin J. Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He was known for his sense of humor in the physics community.<ref name="autogenerated5" />Template:Rp On August 26, 2008, Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in New York City, answering questions from passersby.<ref name=street>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He answered questions such as "What is the strong force?" and "What happened before the Big Bang?".<ref name=street/>

He had three children with his first wife, Florence Gordon, and toward the end of his life lived with his second wife, Ellen (Carr), in Driggs, Idaho.<ref name="Nobelprize" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lederman was an atheist.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lederman began to suffer from memory loss in 2011 and, after struggling with medical bills, he had to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to cover the costs in 2015.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He died of complications from dementia on October 3, 2018, at a care facility in Rexburg, Idaho, at the age of 96.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="nyto">Template:Cite news</ref>

Honors and awardsEdit

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  • Elliott Cresson Prize of the Franklin Institute, 1976.<ref name=":1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Medallion, Division of Particles and Fields, Mexican Physical Society, 1999.<ref name=more/>
  • AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Prize, 2000
  • Vannevar Bush Prize, 2012.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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PublicationsEdit

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See alsoEdit

References and notesEdit

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External linksEdit

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