Nobel Prize Laureate Physicist. He was an American physicist, who was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions". Born the son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Ukraine, he graduated valedictorian from the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School before entering Yale College at the age of fifteen. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics at Yale in 1948, and since he was unable to obtain a scholarship for Yale or Princeton universities, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his PhD, graduating in 1951. Starting the same year, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton University. In 1958, he, along with 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient, Richard Feynman, discovered the chiral structures of the weak interaction in physics. His work in the 1950s involved the recently discovered kaons and hyperons, which are cosmic ray particles. In 1961, he, along with Japanese physicist Kazuhiko Nishijima, introduced a classification scheme for hadrons, another elementary particle. Nishijma was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1960 and 1961. Three years later, he postulated the existence of quarks, which make up hadrons. It was for this research and his work surrounding the interactions of elementary particles that earned him the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics. He introduced other ideas and terms that are still used in his field. He worked as a professor at various universities during his career including the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and from 1955, the California Institute of Technology. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, as well as a professor at both the University of New Mexico and the University of Southern California. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also earned various other awards and honors during his career including the Albert Einstein Medal in 2005 and Franklin Medal in 1967. He was the co-author of "The Eightfold Way" in 1964 and "Broken Scale Variance and the Light" in 1971. He was a member of various learned societies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1962 and the Royal Society as a foreign member from 1978. He received several honorary degrees including ones from Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England, Yale University, and Columbia University in New York City. Besides science, he had a host of various interests including birdwatching, languages and much more to the point that he was considered a "walking encyclopedia." He was a member of the board of directors of the "Encyclopedia Britannica." He married twice and was a widower once. He had a daughter with his first wife.