Today is the birthday of Nobel laureate David Gross, who was born in 1941 in Washington, DC. In the 1970s, working with Frank Wilczek, his graduate student at Princeton University, Gross discovered that the strength of the strong interaction between quarks was inversely asymptotic to the distance between them. Termed asymptotic freedom, and discovered independently by David Politzer, the discovery was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. Currently Gross is a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
