Gell-Mann was raised in a family of
Jewish immigrants in
Manhattan. He graduated from high school at age fourteen, failed to complete his senior thesis at
Yale, then earned a Ph.D. in physics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the time he was twenty-one.
Robert Oppenheimer brought him to the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, then in 1952 Gell-Mann went to the
University of Chicago to work with
Enrico Fermi. It was about that time that he developed his theory of particle beams with unexpected longetivity, which he called "strangeness." He accepted his first tenured position, at
Cal Tech, where he formed a strained partnership of sorts with
Richard Feynman.
In 1960 Gell-Mann discovered the relation between different-sized particles, and saw that they fit together beautifully in groups of eight. He called this the Eightfold Way, and it showed that a subatomic particle had structure, that a proton was made of three tiny particles called quarks.
The Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman said that one of the crucial things he learned from Gell-Mann was the importance of packaging a theory.
info from Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1999), by George Johnson