Jerome Isaac Friedman

Jerome Isaac Friedman (born March 28, 1930) is an American experimental physicist renowned for his role in establishing the quark model of matter through deep inelastic scattering experiments. He shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor for pioneering investigations involving high-energy electron scattering off protons and neutrons, which revealed their substructure and provided crucial evidence for quarks as fundamental constituents. These experiments, conducted primarily at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center using MIT-designed spectrometers, demonstrated that protons and neutrons are composite particles, overturning prior views of them as elementary and laying foundational support for quantum chromodynamics. Friedman, born in Chicago to Russian immigrant parents, earned his bachelor's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago before joining MIT's faculty in 1960, where he advanced to Institute Professor Emeritus and led key research groups.

Jerome Isaac Friedman was born on March 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, the second of two children born to Selig and Lillian (née Warsaw) Friedman, who had immigrated to the United States from Russia. 13 The family was Jewish, and Friedman's parents navigated the challenges of immigrant life in early 20th-century America, with his father exhibiting a personal curiosity about science despite having no formal education. 12