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 parity laws, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary 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 Study.
Born in 1922 in China’s eastern Anhui province, 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 law of parity earned them this honor in 1957.
The Nobel committee praised “their extensive research…which led to important discoveries concerning elementary particles.”
Yang received his science degree in 1942 from the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, and then earned a master’s degree from Tsinghua University.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he went to the United States on a Tsinghua scholarship and studied at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, inventor of the world’s first nuclear reactor.
Throughout his prolific career, he worked in all areas of physics, but maintained a particular interest in the areas of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.
Yang received the Albert Einstein Memorial Prize in 1957 and also received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University in 1958.
Yang married his first wife Chih Li Tu in 1950, with whom he had three children.
After Tu’s death in 2003, Yang married his second wife, Weng Fan, who is more than 50 years his junior.
The two men first met in 1995, when Weng was a student in a physics seminar, and then reconnected in 2004.
At the time, Yang called it his “final blessing from God.”
