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Stephen Chen

Ling Xin

Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Chen-ning Yang died in Beijing on Saturday, weeks after marking his 103rd birthday.
Yang died of illness, according to state news agency Xinhua. No details were given.
He was often ranked alongside Albert Einstein as one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists.
In 1954, Yang co-authored a set of equations with the American physicist Robert Mills that turned out to be as important to physics as Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The resulting Yang–Mills theory described how three of nature’s four fundamental forces – the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions – operate in the subatomic world.
It laid the mathematical foundation for what later became known as the Standard Model, the cornerstone of modern physics that unifies these forces and explains the behaviour of all known elementary particles.

“Yang was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century,” said Shi Yu, professor of physics and associate director of the Wilczek Quantum Centre at the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies.
Without the Yang-Mills theory, there would be no Standard Model, Shi said. “From this point of view, Yang was closer to Einstein than his contemporaries.”
According to Shi, Yang’s most profound contribution was changing the mindset of Chinese people – who once believed they were not as good as others in science – and inspiring future generations to believe they could stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best scientists.
In 1957, Yang and Shanghai-born Tsung-dao Lee became the first Chinese-born scientists to be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for another discovery that left the scientific world in awe.
Physicists had commonly believed in a concept known as parity, which held that a particle that decayed would always result in the same number of subparticles.
But Yang and Lee challenged that theory with a seminal paper published in 1956, in which they suggested experiments that would show that the number of subparticles created by a decaying particle could vary.
Later experiments by another Chinese-American physicist, Chien-shiung Wu, validated their theory.
Yang was born in 1922, in Hefei, Anhui province, but spent most of his youth in Beijing, where his father was a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University.
When the Japanese advanced on Beijing in 1937, the family fled to Hefei before moving to Kunming, in Yunnan province, where Tsinghua, Peking University and Nankai University merged to form the wartime National Southwestern Associated University.
Yang received his bachelor’s degree there in 1942. Four years later, he enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Chicago on a US government scholarship to study under the supervision of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.


Many scientists returned to China after the Communist Party established the People’s Republic in 1949, but Yang chose to stay on in the United States. After years of travelling back and forth, he returned to China for good in 2003.
A year after earning his PhD in 1948, Yang was employed as a theoretical physics researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein worked.
Yang remained active in the decades thereafter, making significant contributions in a wide range of areas, including topological field theory and condensed matter physics.
He received a number of awards, including the Bower Award and Prize in Science in 1994, worth US$250,000 – the most lucrative American science prize at the time.
Yang also facilitated scientific exchanges between China and the US. He was one of two founding council members of Hong Kong’s Shaw Prize, which rewards achievements in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.
Upon his retirement, he became an honorary professor at Tsinghua.
On Saturday, the university’s homepage appeared in black and white in tribute to Yang.
Yang married Chih-li Tu, the daughter of a Kuomintang general, in 1950. They had two sons and a daughter.
More than a year after Tu’s death in 2003, Yang, then 82, married Weng Fan, then 28. People close to the couple said the two lived happily together because Yang maintained a youthful heart.
Earlier this month, during China’s National Day holiday, Yang celebrated his 103rd birthday in Beijing.
A video posted on social media showed him at his home, which was decorated with balloons and flowers. He was shown smiling and talking with colleagues from Tsinghua.
Yang was also shown creating a calligraphic inscription with a traditional Chinese brush. His colleagues praised him for “staying at the forefront of science and politics”.


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Researcher whose contribution to science was described as ‘close to Einstein’ specialised in the study of subatomic particles


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