User:TimothyRias/temp

Biography
Martin Perl's parents migrated to the United States at the start of the 20th century, as Jews in Polish are of Russia they were fleeing both poverty and antisemitism. Intent on making it into the middle class, they were hard workers. Perl's mother, Fay Rosenthal, worked as a secretary and later a bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants. His father, Oscar Perl, worked as a salesman in printing and stationary, later starting his own firm, Allied Printing.

Perl and his sister, Lila, were born in Brooklyn in the 1920s. Allied Printing was earning the family a modest income, allowing them to send the children to decent schools. Intent on them having a better life, Perl's parents expected them to worked hard and get good grades. And so Martin Perl did, skipping several grades, he graduated from James Madison High School in 1942 at the age of sixteen.

As a child Martin Perl was a fervent reader with a broad interest ranging from simple fiction and cooking to history and science. Two of his favorite books were Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Millions and Science for the Citizen. In particular he was interested in mechanics and chemistry.

Despite his interest in and talent for science and mathematics, Perl did not think of becoming a scientists. As a Jewish immigrant it was expected that he used is education to "earn a good living", which meant become a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. To make the most of his talents and interests he and his parents decided that he should become an engineer, an already somewhat unusual choice for a Jewish boy from that period.

Undergraduate education and the war
Perl enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now Polytechnic University to study chemical engineering. In his opinion chemistry was the field were things were happening at the time. His impression of physics was that it was an old and dead field, and he found the basic physics course that were part of his curriculum, the be very dull.

His studies were interrupted by the second world war. He wanted to join the army, but he was still a minor and his parents would not let him. Instead he was allowed to join United States Merchant Marine. After the war he was drafted, spent a year in an army installation in Washington D.C. Finally, in 1948 he returned to college and obtained his bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering summa cum laude.

After graduation he joined the General Electric Company as a trainee chemical engineer. He was placed with the  Electron Tube Division, where he worked on streamlining the production of television picture tubes. Because he knew very little about how electron tubes worked, he enrolled at Union College in Schenectady to take a few courses in advanced calculus and atomic physics. One day one of his professor's Vladimir Rojansky told him, "Martin, what you are interested in is called physics not chemistry!".

Graduate study
Taking the advice from his professor, Perl enrolled at Columbia University physics department as a graduate student. Perl, as a chemical engineer, did not have the same educational background as his fellow students. As a result he struggled his way through graduate study, always working hard, never the top of his class.

As the topic of his doctoral thesis Perl choose to measure the quadrupole moment of the sodium nucleus. His advisor was the 1944 Nobel Prize laureate, Isidor Rabi. From Rabi he did not learn much in terms of experimental techniques, for which he had to rely mostly on his fellow students. Instead he learned the importance of choosing one's own research problems and of getting the right answer and checking it thoroughly. Rabi also taught him the him the importance of working on fundamental problems and insisted that he continue in particle physics rather than the atomic physics that was the subject of his thesis.