Chen Ning Yang, one of the world's most famous physicists and a Nobel laureate, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after an illness, state media Xinhua reported.
Yang was born in 1922 in eastern China's Hefei, Anhui province. He was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in particle physics.
Yang shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-Dao Li, who died in 2024.
They were awarded the prize for work that overturned the widely accepted “laws of parity” – the forces acting on fundamental subatomic particles are symmetrical between left and right sides. In a popular description, they overturned the concept of “mirror symmetry”.
Before Lee and Yang questioned this fundamental principle, it was believed that the mirror image of any process reflects a sequence of events that could just as easily happen in the real world. Essentially, it is impossible to determine whether you are observing a real event or a mirror image of it.
Yang grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University near Beijing, where his father was a mathematics professor, according to a biographical information on the Nobel Prize website.
After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies at Chinese universities, he moved to the United States at the end of World War II for an internship at the University of Chicago.
There he came under the influence of Professor Enrico Fermi, an Italian and naturalized American physicist, known as the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor.
From 1949, Yang was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he became a professor in 1955.
With Reuters
