- Person
- Leon Lederman
- Lived
- 1922–2018
- Field
- Particle physics
- From
- American
The story
Leon Lederman was born in New York City in 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents; his father ran a hand laundry and, as Lederman wrote, venerated learning. He went through the city's public schools and the free City College of New York before becoming one of the leading experimental physicists of his time. He co-discovered the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977, and from 1978 he directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.
Lederman believed that the excitement of science should not belong only to specialists. In 1983, as Fermilab's director, he met Stephanie Marshall, then an associate superintendent in the local Batavia school district, who had come to learn about his campaign to teach physics first in high schools. The two discovered that both had been born in the Bronx and had gone to the City Colleges. They talked about the Bronx High School of Science, the selective public school that had launched so many scientists, and Lederman said, almost off the cuff, that Illinois needed one too. Marshall said she would do it.
Lederman was also the Illinois governor's science adviser, and after what Marshall called a tumultuous period in state politics, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy was established in 1985 through a partnership of scientists, educators, business leaders, legislators and the governor. It opened in Aurora in 1986 as a public, residential high school, free to students, for young people talented in mathematics and science from every part of the state. Marshall became its founding president and led it until 2007; Lederman joined its board of trustees.
After he retired from Fermilab in 1989, Lederman moved into an office at the academy as part of a resident scientist programme. Students remembered him walking the halls with an ice cream cone, stopping to ask them questions and really listening to the answers. In 2007 he and Marshall gave the commencement speech together under the title Two Kids from the Bronx.
Why it matters
The academy Lederman helped found still gives talented Illinois teenagers, whatever their family's income, a free, advanced education in mathematics and science.
About Leon Lederman
Bronx-raised physicist who co-discovered the muon neutrino and the bottom quark, ran Fermilab, and founded a public science academy and programmes that changed how children learn science.
More about Leon Lederman
Sources
- Leon Lederman (1922-2018) Physics Today
- Leon M. Lederman, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Leon M. Lederman Fermilab Office of Education and Public Outreach
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.