Jerome Friedman shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for physics with physicists Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor for the trio's research leading to the discovery of quarks--supercharged subatomic particles found in protons and neutrons. Friedman had originally become interested in atomic research while at Stanford University, where he worked with physicist Robert Hofstadter on his studies of the atomic nucleus. This research went on until 1960, when Friedman left Stanford to join the physics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Kendall and Taylor joined Friedman at MIT in the early 1960s. Originally, the three scientists intended to merely extend Hofstadter's original findings; instead, they made a discovery once described by a colleague as "one of the pivotal contributions to physics in this century."

Friedman was born in Chicago on March 28, 1930, the younger of two sons of Selig and Lillian Warsaw Friedman. Selig Friedman had immigrated to the United States...