Leon Max Lederman, son of Russian immigrants Morris Lederman and Minna Rosenberg, was born on July 15, 1922, in New York City. Lederman pursued his undergraduate education at the City College of New York, earning a baccalaureate degree in chemistry in 1943. After serving three years in the U.S. Army, Lederman enrolled at Columbia University in New York City to study physics. He began his doctoral research in 1948, designing a special instrument to study subatomic particles produced by a new atom-smasher (the synchrocyclotron accelerator) then under construction at Columbia's Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York. In 1950, while still a graduate student, Lederman and physicist John Tinlot made special modifications to the Nevis accelerator, transforming the machine into a significantly more powerful research tool. In his doctoral research, Lederman used the new Columbia accelerator to measure the lifetimes of two different kinds of pions, a type of meson or fundamental particle...