Murray Gell-Mann, a particle physicist, helped to develop the Stanford model, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles and their forces. He contributed some unique ways of categorizing and naming elementary particles including strangeness, the eight-fold way, and the quark. Though a theoretical physicist, Gell-Mann has made many important suggestions to experimental physicists for detecting the particles that he predicted in theory. For his work in classifying these particles and their interactions, Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969.

Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929, in New York City. His father, Arthur Gell-Mann, was the proprietor of a language school and very learned in the areas of astronomy, archeology, and mathematics. Like his father Murray Gell-Mann had many varied interests including archeology, linguistics, and ornithology. In an interview for Omni magazine he said that when he asked his father about studying one of them for a...