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Leon Lederman shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for discovering the muon neutrino, work done at Columbia's particle accelerator before he went on to direct Fermilab. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 1986 and spent his later years popularizing physics, most notably coining "the God particle" as a nickname for the Higgs boson in his 1993 book of that title — a phrase physicists have been half-apologizing for ever since.