Background
Ethnicity:
Parents emigrated to the United States from Russia.
Friedman was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States on March 28, 1930, the son of Selig and Lillian (Warsaw) Friedman.
Ethnicity:
Parents emigrated to the United States from Russia.
Friedman was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States on March 28, 1930, the son of Selig and Lillian (Warsaw) Friedman.
Friedman received his Master degree in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1956 from the University of Chicago.
Friedman started working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s nuclear emulsion laboratory under Valentine Telegdi in 1957. The same year he joined Hofstadter's group at the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford University as a Research Associate. There Jerome did a number of experiments studying elastic and inelastic electrondeuteron scattering. Three years later Friedman was appointed as a faculty member in the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Later he accepted a position at Stanford University, where he made a collaborative effort to measure muon pair production at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA) in order to test the validity of Quantum Electro-Dynamics.
In 1963, Jerome with physicist Henry Kendall started a collaboration with W. K. H. Panofsky, Richard Taylor and other physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the California Institute of Technology to develop electron scattering facilities for a physics program at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 20 GeV electron linac that was being constructed under the leadership of Panofsky. Friedman and Kendall established a MIT group at this center.
He became a full professor of physics in 1967 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thirteen years later Friedman became a director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at this institute. Then he worked as a head of the physics department at MIT from 1983 to 1988. In 1990, Jerome held the position of a Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked until 2005 and the same year became a Professor Emeritus.
Friedman serves as an honorary professor at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Physics and the Faculty's world famous institutes, Institute of Physics, Institute of Physics, Zemun and Vinca Nuclear Institute.
Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with his colleague Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor for his series of experiments from 1967 to 1973 and empirically proved the existence of particles corresponded to the fundamental particles called quarks, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig.
Quotations:
"Young people should be given good support and freedom in their research. They are the greatest source of scientific creativity because they are not as committed to existing scientific orthodoxy, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to push new ideas."
"Excessive bureaucracy is distracting, time-consuming, and destructive to creativity."
"Innovation is the key to the future, but basic research is the key to future innovation."
"We should willingly take risks in supporting new projects. The tendency is to play it safe when funding is low, but we need to remember that the greatest risks have the greatest payoffs."
Friedman was a president of American Physical Society in 1999. He is a member of National Academy of Sciences.
Jerome Friedman married to Tania Letetsky-Baranovsky in 1956. They have four children.
