Hugh David Politzer

Born August 31, 1949, Politzer made his career-defining discovery while still a graduate student, working on the quantum field theory governing quarks and gluons. The finding — shared with David Gross and Frank Wilczek — revealed that the strong nuclear force weakens at short distances, the opposite of everyday intuition, a property called asymptotic freedom. The Nobel committee recognized the trio in 2004. Politzer landed at the California Institute of Technology, where he holds the Richard Chace Tolman chair in theoretical physics.