May 27, 1998
Nobel Laureate Physicist Leon M. Lederman
to Receive Honorary Penn State Doctoral Degree
15 May 1998
Nobel Laureate Physicist Leon M. Lederman to Receive Honorary Penn State Doctoral Degree
Penn State's Board of Trustees approved today (May 15) the granting of the Honorary Doctorate of Science degree to Nobel Laureate Physicist Leon M. Lederman at the December 1998 commencement ceremonies.
Leon Max Lederman, director emeritus of Fermilab, belongs to the small group of theoretical and experimental physicists who revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world. He participated in the discovery of the K-meson particle and the non-conservation of parity during muon decay and, with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for the identification of the muon neutrino. The design of ever more powerful accelerators enabled them to find the first anti-matter particle in 1965 and the bottom quark in 1977. The top quark was discovered at Fermilab in 1994.
Lederman won the National Medal for Science in 1965 and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1983. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from City College of New York and a master's degree and Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University where he joined the faculty and remained for nearly 30 years.
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Contact: Christy Rambeau at (814) 865-7517