Leon M. Lederman

Leon M. Lederman was an American experimental physicist who lived from 1922 to 2018, recognized for discovering the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. He held a professorship at Columbia University from 1958, spent time at CERN in 1960, directed Fermilab from 1979 to 1989, later taught at the University of Chicago and served as Pritzker Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 1986. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, shared with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, and popularized the term God particle for the Higgs boson in his 1993 book of that name. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, shared with Martin Lewis Perl.