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 listed the cause of death as illness.
Yang and fellow theoretical physicist Li Tsung-Dao were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work on the laws of parity, which led to important discoveries about elementary particles, the building blocks of matter.
Yang was also a professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University and dean emeritus of that institution's Institute for Advanced Study.
He was born in 1922 in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. He was the eldest of five children and grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University, where his father was a mathematics professor.
As a teenager, Yang told his parents, “One day I want to win the Nobel Prize.”
He realized this dream at the age of 35 when his work with Lee on the study of the parity law earned them this honor in 1957.
The Nobel Committee praised “their profound research… which has led to important discoveries concerning elementary particles.”
Yang received his degree in 1942 from National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, and then received his master's degree from Tsinghua University.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he traveled to the United States on a Tsinghua scholarship and studied at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, inventor world's first nuclear reactor.
Throughout his prolific career he worked in all areas of physics, but retained a special interest in the areas of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.
Yang received the Albert Einstein Memorial Award in 1957 and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Princeton University in 1958.
Yang married his first wife Chi Li Tu in 1950, with whom he had three children.
After Tu's death in 2003, Yang married his second wife, Wen Fan, who is more than 50 years his junior.
The couple first met in 1995 while Wen was taking a physics seminar and later reunited in 2004.
At the time, Yang called her his “final blessing from God.”
