Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the February 1995 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes in Scientific American.

I first saw Yoichiro Nambu almost 10 years ago, from the back row of a graduate seminar in physics at the University of Chicago. A small man in a neat suit, he was sketching long, snaking tubes on the blackboard. Sometimes he said they were vortex lines, found in superconductors; other times he called them strings, connecting quarks. Mystified, and yet fascinated by a bridge between such disparate realms, I later asked him to be my thesis adviser.

Face to face, Nambu was still hard to understand. I was clearly not the first to try. Bruno Zumino of the University of California at Berkeley once recounted his own attempts: "I had the idea that if I can find out what Nambu is thinking about now, I'll be 10 years ahead in the game. So I talked to him for a long time. But by the time I fi- gured out what he said, 10 years had passed." Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., explains: "People don't understand him, because he is so farsighted."

Nambu was the first to see that when a physical system such as a superconductor --or an ocean of quarks--defies the symmetry imposed by physical laws, a new particle is born. Along with Moo-Young Han, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, he proposed the existence of gluons, the objects that hold quarks together. He also realized that quarks act as if they are connected by strings, an idea that became the foundation of string theory. "Over the years," remarks Murray Gell- Mann of the Santa Fe Institute, "you could rely on Yoichiro to provide deep and penetrating insights on very many questions."

The roots of Nambu's originality may lie in a singular childhood in prewar Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1921, he was two when the city was destroyed by an earthquake. (He still has a vague recollection of flames.) Kichiro Nambu, his father, had run away from home to attend university and there had met his bride, Kimiko. The earthquake forced him to return to his hometown of Fukui, near Kyoto, with his wife and young son.

The prodigal was forgiven (although his wife never was). Retaining traces of defiance, Kichiro Nambu became a schoolteacher and built his house on the outskirts of town--an act that was later to save him from Allied bombs. From Tokyo he had brought back an eclectic library. Browsing there, his growing boy learned of ideas that allowed him to flee, at least mentally, the excruciating regimen at the local school.

Fukui, in those days, prided itself on having the most militaristic school in Japan. The boys dressed in scratchy army uniforms and were taught to march, shoot and salute. "If you didn't see a senior boy and so didn't salute him, he would punch you out," Nambu recalls. "You had to keep one eye on every person." At 4:00 A.M. in midwinter, he would walk a mile to school to learn Samurai sword fighting, barefoot on bare floors in unheated halls. To the frail child, school proved as trying as, later, the real Imperial army.

Nor did the school neglect the mind. Heroic deeds-- notably, that of a schoolteacher who died saving the emperor's picture from a fire--embellished the curriculum. Nambu was protected from such teachings by his father's antiestablishment diatribes. Yet they also prevented him from fitting in. "I had a longing to be like the other boys," he smiles ruefully. As he grew, he came to realize that his father's opinions were dangerous in an increasingly warlike Japan.