Portrait of Gerald Guralnik

Birthday profile

Gerald Guralnik

Gerald Guralnik, American physicist and academic (died 2014)

Born
September 17, 1936
Died
April 26, 2014
Zodiac sign
Virgo
Birth year
1936

About Gerald Guralnik

Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik (; September 17, 1936 – April 26, 2014) was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964, he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2010, Guralnik was awarded the American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for the "elucidation of the properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses". Guralnik received his B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1964. He went to Imperial College London as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the National Science Foundation and then became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester. In the fall of 1967 Guralnik went to Brown University and frequently visited Imperial College and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was a staff member from 1985 to 1987. While at Los Alamos, he did extensive work on the development and application of computational methods for lattice QCD. Guralnik died of a heart attack at age 77 in 2014.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Gerald Guralnik timeline

  1. In 1964, he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C.
  2. In 1964, he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK).
  3. In 2010, Guralnik was awarded the American Physical Society's J.

The world when Gerald Guralnik was born

Gerald Guralnik was born in 1936. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1936

  • #1 song"The Way You Look Tonight" – Fred Astaire
  • Top movieModern Times (Charlie Chaplin)
  • Top TV showBBC Television Service launches
  • Best-selling bookGone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentJesse Owens wins 4 gold medals at Berlin Olympics
  • Top headlineJesse Owens dominates the Berlin Olympics
  • Technology milestoneBBC launches the world's first regular television service
  • Defining fadSwing dancing
  • Notable inventionSun glasses (mass-produced)
  • World population2.26 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderFranklin D. Roosevelt
  • Sports championNew York Yankees (World Series)
  • U.S. population128.1M

1936 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Gerald Guralnik's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19362026
Gas$0.19$3.45/gal
Average home$5,100$435,000
Average income$2,900$67,500
Minimum wage$0.25$7.25/hr (federal)
Movie ticket$0.25$11.95
Postage stamp$0.03$0.73
Population128.1M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.