Leon M. Lederman

From Free net encyclopedia

Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois, in 1986.

He received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He then taught at Columbia until 1979, when he took an extended leave of absence to become Fermilab's director. He resigned from Columbia and Fermilab effective in 1989 and taught briefly at the University of Chicago before moving to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is now Pritzker Professor Emeritus of Science.

His current occupation is a resident scholar in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Dr. Lederman is also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

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Quotes

"Physics isn't a religion, if it was, it would be a lot easier to make money." -- Leon Lederman

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Publications

The God Particle : If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (ISBN 0385312113)
From Quarks to the Cosmos by Leon Lederman and David N. Schramm (ISBN 0716760126)
Portraits of Great American Scientists Leon M. Lederman, et al (ISBN 1573929328)
Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill (ISBN 1591022428)