Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos.

[6] Lederman graduated from James Monroe High School in the South Bronx,[7] and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943.

[15][16] Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.

[17] Lederman served as president of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was chair emeritus.

R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified the parity violation.

[24] They delayed publication of their results until after Wu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back-to-back in the same physics journal.

[26] As the director of Fermilab, Lederman was a prominent supporter[27][28] of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.

[34] Lederman's best friend during his college years, Martin J. Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers".

[9]: 17  On August 26, 2008, Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in New York City, answering questions from passersby.

[38][39] Lederman began to suffer from memory loss in 2011 and, after struggling with medical bills, he had to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to cover the costs in 2015.