Ten Nobels for the future

Leon Max Lederman was born in New York in 1922, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He studied Chemistry at City College of New York, receiving his BS in 1943. Following three years in the army, he began studying Physics at Columbia University, earning his Master's in 1948 and his Ph.D in 1951. He stayed on at Columbia following his studies, remaining for nearly thirty years.

Lederman belongs to the small group of theoretical and experimental physicists that between the 1950s and 1970s revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world. He participated in the discovery of the K-meson particle and the non-conservation of parity during muon decay and, with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger in 1962, the identification of the muon neutrino, for which the three received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988. The design of ever more powerful accelerators, first at Brookhaven National Laboratory, enabled them to find the first anti-matter particle in 1965 and the bottom quark in 1977.

A convinced proponent of science education, as director of Fermilab Lederman opened the lab to countries not previously associated with high energy physics. He is the driving force behind the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the first state-wide residence public school for gifted children, and the Teacher's Academy of Mathematics and Science in Chicago.

The many awards and honours he has received include the National Medal for Science in 1965 and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1983. He is a past chairman and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A final note: in 1994, researchers at Fermilab, where he is now Director Emeritus, succeeded in detecting the top quark, the bottom quark's elusive companion of the previous 17 years.

1994
The future
of science education