Jerome Friedman was born in Chicago in 1930. In his youth he was inclined towards the arts, especially painting, but after he read Albert Einstein’s book “Relativity”, he began to take an interest in physics, studied at the University of Chicago, and in 1956 received his Ph.D. from 1960 he served as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his research focusing on particle physics.

Jerome Friedman and his research partners, Henry Kendal and Richard Taylor, were awarded the 1990 Nobel prize in Physics “For their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.”

Following the research of Ernest Rutherford, who first discovered the atom nucleus at the beginning of the 20th Century, great scientific effort was made to identify the building blocks of matter. Protons, electrons and neutrons were discovered, and later on more elementary particles.

The theoreticians Gell-mann and Zweig postulated a model in which each hadron, such as the proton and the neutron, is composed of triplets of particles called quarks. Friedman and his colleagues verified that model by observations they made on the internal structure of those particles, which make up the atom’s nucleus.