Leon Lederman, a Nobel Laureate and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science who shed light on the basic building blocks of matter and sought to revolutionize science education, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96.
Lederman and two colleagues won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for their detection of the muon neutrino 22 years prior. Until their discovery, the nearly massless, subatomic particles called neutrinos were believed to exist in only one “flavor.” Three varieties are now known to exist.
Even as an intellectual powerhouse who took pride is his achievements as a postdoctoral researcher and professor at Columbia University, Lederman maintained a characteristic wit and self-effacing disposition. “During my academic career at Columbia (1951 – 1979) I have had 50 Ph.D. students,” he wrote in his Nobel Lectures autobiography. “Fourteen are professors of physics, one is a university president and the rest with few exceptions, are physicists at national labs, in government or in industry. None, to my knowledge, is in jail.”
“It comes from a terror of taking myself seriously,” Lederman said about his humor in a 1998 New York Times interview. “It also puts me into a comfortable relationship with other people. It’s human to want to make people laugh.”
“It’s part of teaching,” he added. “Teaching is show business.”
After establishing himself as one of the most important particle physicists in history, Lederman devoted his life to primary and secondary education.
Born in Manhattan in 1922 to Jewish immigrants from Russia and raised in the Bronx, Lederman lived in and around New York City until age 57, save three post-college years serving in World War II with the Army Signal Corps and sabbaticals at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva and other laboratories.
In 1979, he left his position as director of Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories to lead the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago. He used his new home as a testing ground for the changes to K-12 science instruction that he hoped to see implemented worldwide.