Nobel Prize-winning Physicist to Lecture on the Simple and the Complex By Marci Janas
	Murray Gell-Mann		NOVEMBER 12, 1999--Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, will deliver a free public lecture at 4:30 P.M. Monday, November 15, in King 306. The title of his talk is "Plectics: The Study of Simplicity and Complexity." Gell-Mann, who introduced the word quark into the lexicon, is the author of the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Gell-Mann's eightfold-way theory brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 particles in the atom's nucleus. Later Gell-Mann found that all the particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named quarks. He and others have constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons, called quantum chromodynamics, which seems to account for all the nuclear particles and their strong interactions. The winner of many other awards and honors, Gell-Mann is professor and cochair of the Santa Fe Institute Science Board and the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. (Millikan, also a Nobel Prize-winner, graduated from Oberlin College in 1891.) Gell-Mann taught at Cal Tech from 1955 until 1993. Gell-Mann is a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves on the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. Oberlin's Environmental Studies Program, Mead-Swing Lecture Committee, and offices of the President and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences are sponsoring the lecture. Gell-Mann is married to the poet Marcia Southwick, who is giving a poetry reading the same day at 7:30 P.M. in King 106.
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