Schwartz, Melvin

Schwartz, Melvin (1932–  ) physicist; born in New York City. After completing all his university work at Columbia, including his Ph.D. (1958), he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1956–58), taught at Columbia (1958–66), then moved to Stanford as a physics professor (1966–83). Meanwhile, in 1970 he had founded a company, Digital Pathways, Inc., to produce systems that secure computers from outside tamperers, and in 1983 he left academic work to devote himself to this company. Schwartz shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger for work they had collaborated on while at Columbia (1960–63)—specifically, for an experiment that used an accelerator-created beam of neutrinos to examine the effect of weak nuclear forces at high energies; this in turn led to their discovery that there are two types of neutrinos. In 1991 Schwartz returned to the Brookhaven National Laboratory to take up his work with high energy and nuclear physics.