Gross, David Jonathan, 1941–, American particle physicist, b. Washington, D.C., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1966. Gross was a professor at Princeton from 1969 to 1997, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara. He was a co-recipient, with David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their development in 1973 of a mathematical framework that led to the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which explained how the nucleus of the atom works. The theory was an important contribution to the standard model of particle physics, which describes all physics in terms of four forces or interactions—their findings concerned strong interactions.
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