The theoretical work of American physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow (born 1932) made an important contribution to the unification of elementary particles and forces. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for physics.

Sheldon Lee Glashow was born on December 5, 1932, in the northern tip of Manhattan in New York City. He was the youngest of three children of two Russian immigrants, Lewis Gluchovsky, a plumber, and Bella Rubin. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950; one of his classmates was Steven Weinberg, with whom Glashow later shared the Nobel Prize. He received his B.A. from Cornell (1954) and Ph.D. from Harvard (1958). A post-doctoral fellow at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen from 1958 to 1960, Glashow taught at Stanford (1961-1962) and Berkeley (1962-1966) before assuming a professorship at Harvard in 1966, where he remained into the 1990s. Beginning 1979 he was the Higgins Professor...