Martin Lewis Perl

Martin Lewis Perl was an American physicist who lived from 1927 to 2014, best known for discovering the tau lepton, an elementary particle roughly 3,477 times more massive than the electron, through experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center between 1974 and 1977. He worked at the University of Michigan before moving to SLAC, later held a visiting professorship at the University of Liverpool, and was mentored as a doctoral student by I. I. Rabi while himself later mentoring physicist Samuel C. C. Ting. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, shared with Leon M. Lederman.