China’s science community pays tribute to late Nobel-winning physicist Tsung-Dao Lee
- Lee died aged 97 on Sunday, after a lifetime of nurturing talent and building China’s sci-tech sector through academic and practical programmes
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Lee sought breakthroughs in fields including quantum field theory, elementary particle theory, nuclear physics and statistical mechanics, and made “lasting and clear contributions to the development of physics”, according to a joint obituary released on Monday by the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Beijing-based China Centre of Advanced Science and Technology.
“He made significant contributions to the development of science and technology, education and talent cultivation in China,” the obituary said.
Born in Shanghai in 1926, he enrolled at National Che Kiang University – now Zhejiang University – during the war years and in 1945 moved to the National Southwestern Associated University, an institution formed from Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai universities in Kunming in Yunnan province.
The following year, nominated by his teacher for a Chinese government scholarship, he set off for the United States where he began his graduate studies at the University of Chicago and was accepted as a doctoral student by Enrico Fermi, also a Nobel laureate in physics.
