Chinese Nobel prize winning physicist dies aged 103
Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel laureate and one of the world’s most influential physicists, has died at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media.
An obituary published by CCTV cited illness as the cause of death.
Yang and fellow theoretical physicist Lee Tsung-Dao were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work on equivalence laws that led to important discoveries about fundamental particles, the building blocks of matter.
Yang was also a professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and honorary dean of the institution’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
Born in 1922 in eastern China’s Anhui province, he was the eldest of five children and grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University, where his father was a professor of mathematics.
As a teenager, Yang told his parents: “I want to win the Nobel Prize one day.”
He achieved this dream at the age of 35, when his work with Lee on equality legislation earned them the honor in 1957.
The Nobel committee praised his “in-depth research that led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles.”
Yang received his science degree from National Southwest Associated University in Kunming in 1942 and later completed his master’s degree at Tsinghua University.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he went to the United States on a scholarship from Tsinghua and studied at the University of Chicago; Here he worked under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the inventor of the atom. world’s first nuclear reactor.
During his productive career he worked in all areas of physics, but paid particular attention to the fields of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.
Yang received the Albert Einstein Memorial Prize in 1957 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University in 1958.
Yang married his first wife, Chih Li Tu, in 1950 and they had three children.
Following Tu’s death in 2003, Yang married his second wife, Weng Fan, who was 50 years his junior.
The two first met in 1995, when Weng was a student at a physics seminar, and later met again in 2004.
At the time, Yang called it “God’s last blessing.”
