Susumu Okubo

Susumu Okubo (大久保 進, Ōkubo Susumu; 2 March 1930 – July 17, 2015) was a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Rochester. Ōkubo worked primarily on elementary particle physics. He is famous for the Gell-Mann–Okubo mass formula for mesons and baryons in the quark model; this formula correctly predicts the relations of masses of the members of SU(3) multiplets in terms of hypercharge and isotopic spin. Ōkubo died in July 2015.

Ōkubo began study at the University of Tokyo in 1949 and received his bachelor's degree there in 1952. He became a graduate student at the University of Rochester in 1954, where he earned his PhD in 1958 with as thesis advisor. Afterwards, he was a postdoc in 1959/60 at the University of Naples, in 1960/61 at CERN, and then in 1962 began researching again at the University of Rochester, where he became a professor in 1964 and retired in 1996 as an emeritus professor.