Murray Gell-Mann (1929-present) 2005 Humanist of the Year.

"The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet."

--Murray Gell-Mann from The Quark and the Jaguar

Murray Gell-Mann was born in New York City on September 15, 1929. He revealed himself early on as a child prodigy, entering Yale at age fifteen. Graduating in 1948 with a B.S. in physics, he received his Ph.D. in the same field from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. Gell-Mann was a professor at the University of Chicago before moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until 1993.

Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for "his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions." His "eightfold way" theory brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some 100 particles in the atom's nucleus. He then found that all of the particles, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named quarks which are permanently confined by forces coming from the exchange of gluons. He and others later 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.

A colleague once said of Gell-Mann, "Murray has no particular talent for physics, but he's so smart he's a great physicist anyway." Indeed, his interests range from theoretical physics to environmental quality, to linguistics, foreign policy matters, and beyond. He has thus been described as "The Man With Five Brains." Gell-Mann has received numerous awards and honorary degrees and has offered his wide-ranging expertise in various prestigious capacities.

He was a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation from 1979 to 2002. He is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of 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 board of the Wildlife Conservation Society and is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He is a former Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian, and served on the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1994 to 2001.

In 1984 Gell-Mann cofounded the Santa Fe Institute--a nonprofit research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico--to study complex adaptive systems. In addition to currently directing the Evolution of Human Languages Program there, Gell-Mann teaches in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, the poet Marcia Southwick.

In 1994, Gell-Mann published the best-selling book, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, in which he wrote: "I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe." Gell-Mann is a former board member of the Southern California Skeptics and has been a Fellow of the American Humanist Association-founded Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) since 1985. In 2005 Gell-Mann was named Humanist of the Year at the AHA Annual Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.