Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103

Summary

[Photo by Zhu Xingxin/CHINADAILY] Yang Chen-Ning, a world-renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, passed away in Beijing on Saturday at 103. Yang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, professor at Tsinghua University, and the honorary president of the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua, died after an illness, the university said in an obituary, calling the late professor "immortal". Together with his colleague Tsung-dao Lee, Yang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their theory of parity non-conservation in weak interaction. A photo taken in 1923 shows Yang Chen-Ning and his parents at a former residence in Hefei, East China's Anhui province. He was often ranked alongside Albert Einstein as one of the 20th century's greatest physicists. Born in Hefei, Anhui province, in 1922, Yang moved with his family to Tsinghua in 1929. He enrolled at the National Southwestern Associated University in 1938 and later entered the graduate school of Tsinghua University in 1942, earning a master's degree in science in 1944. In 1945, he went to the United States for further studies as a Tsinghua University government-sponsored student, attending the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1948 and remained for postdoctoral work. A photo taken in 1935 shows Yang Chen-Ning at Tsinghua Garden in Beijing. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1949, becoming a permanent member in 1952 and a professor in 1955. In 1966, he was appointed as the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, working there until 1999. Since 1986, he had been a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From 1997, he served as the honorary director of the newly established Center for Advanced Study — now the Institute for Advanced Study — at Tsinghua University and became a Tsinghua professor in 1999. A photo taken in 1952 shows Yang Chen-Ning and other physicists at Princeton's Institute ...