Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann brought visibility to a crucial part of our existence that we can't actually see: elemental particles. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for introducing quarks.

Gell-Mann was called "the man with five brains" — and he had the resume to prove it. In addition to being a Nobel laureate, he was an accomplished physicist who earned numerous awards, medals and honorary degrees for his work with subatomic particles, including the groundbreaking theory that the nucleus of an atom comprises fundamental building blocks called quarks. His influence extended well beyond his field: he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. He also served on the board of the Wildlife Conservation Society and as a director of Encyclopedia Britannica. As professor emeritus of Caltech, led the evolution of human languages program at the Santa Fe Institute, which he cofounded in 1984,

A prolific writer, Gell-Mann penned scores of academic papers and several books, including The Quark and the Jaguar. He is also the subject of the popular science biography Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics.