Yuval Ne'eman (, 14 May 1925 – 26 April 2006) was an Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. He was Minister of Science and Development in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was the President of Tel Aviv University from 1971 to 1977. He was awarded the Israel Prize in the field of exact sciences (which he returned in 1992 in protest of the award of the Israel Prize to Emile Habibi), the Albert Einstein Award, the Wigner Medal, and the EMET Prize for Arts, Sciences and Culture. Biography Yuval Ne'eman was born in Tel Aviv during the Mandate era, graduated from high school at the age of 15, and studied mechanical engineering at the Technion. At the age of 15, Ne'eman also joined the Haganah. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War Ne'eman served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as battalion deputy commander, then as Operations Officer of Tel Aviv, and commander of Givati Brigade. Later (1952–54) he served as Deputy Commander of Operations Department of General Staff, Commander of the Planning Department of the IDF. In this role, he helped organize the IDF into a reservist-based army, developed the mobilization system, and wrote the first draft of Israel's defense doctrine. Between 1958 and 1960 Ne'eman was IDF Attaché in Great Britain, where he also studied for a PhD in physics under the supervision of 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Abdus Salam at Imperial College London. In 1961, he was demobilized from the IDF with a rank of colonel. In 1981, Ne'eman became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. Between 1998 and 2002 Ne'eman was the head of the Israeli Engineer Association Scientific career One of his greatest achievements in physics was his 1961 discovery of the classification of hadrons through the SU(3) flavour symmetry, now named the Eightfold Way, which was also proposed independently by Murray Gell-Mann. This SU(3) symmetry laid the foundation of the quark model, proposed by Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964 (independently of each other). Ne'eman was founder and director of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University from 1965 to 1972, President of Tel Aviv University from 1971 to 1977 (following George S. Wise, and succeeded by Haim Ben-Shahar), and director of its Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies from 1979 to 1997. He was also the co-director (along with Sudarshan) of the Center for Particle Theory at