{"id":383,"date":"2006-04-27T14:18:07","date_gmt":"2006-04-27T19:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=383"},"modified":"2017-10-01T17:32:46","modified_gmt":"2017-10-01T21:32:46","slug":"yuval-neeman-1925-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Yuval Ne&#8217;eman 1925-2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yuval Ne&#8217;eman died yesterday, from a brain hemorrhage caused by a recent fall.  <a href=\"http:\/\/sciencenow.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/2006\/426\/1\">Science<\/a> magazine has a story about this.<\/p>\n<p>Together with Murray Gell-Mann, in 1961 Ne&#8217;eman co-discovered the SU(3) classification of strongly interacting particles.  At the time he was both an Israeli military attache in London, as well as a graduate student of Abdus Salam (who was a devout Muslim).  For some amusing stories of that period, see this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mth.kcl.ac.uk\/~streater\/SU3.html\">web-page of fellow student Ray Streater<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In later years Ne&#8217;eman continued his research in theoretical physics, was president of Tel Aviv University, played an active role in the Israeli nuclear weapons program, and was the head of a far-right political party.  He was definitely one of the most colorful characters in particle theory during the second half of the last century.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update<\/b>: There&#8217;s an obituary from the AP in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/04\/27\/world\/27neeman.htm\">New York Times<\/a>. It&#8217;s only comment about Ne&#8217;eman&#8217;s work in particle theory is that:<\/p>\n<p><i>The Technion credited Dr. Ne&#8217;eman with discovering the principles of tiny subatomic particles, called quarks, although another scientist received the Nobel Prize for that discovery.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Ne&#8217;eman and Gell-Mann both realized that mesons and baryons could be classified as representations of SU(3), and some of the physics of the strong interactions could be understood this way.  Gell-Mann won the Nobel because he later identified the fundamental representation of SU(3) with new particles, quarks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yuval Ne&#8217;eman died yesterday, from a brain hemorrhage caused by a recent fall. Science magazine has a story about this. Together with Murray Gell-Mann, in 1961 Ne&#8217;eman co-discovered the SU(3) classification of strongly interacting particles. At the time he was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=383\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9601,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/9601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}