Chen Ning Yang, a celebrated physicist and Nobel laureate, passed away on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 following an illness, according to state media reports.
Born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui province, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist known for his contributions to statistical mechanics and the study of symmetry in particle physics.
He was jointly awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died earlier this year. Their groundbreaking work challenged the long-held "parity laws," which assumed that interactions between subatomic particles were identical in mirror-image scenarios. Their findings disproved the concept of "mirror symmetry."
Prior to their research, it was widely accepted that any physical process and its mirror image would behave identically in nature. Yang and Lee demonstrated that this was not universally true, fundamentally altering the understanding of particle physics.
Yang grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University near Beijing, where his father taught mathematics, as detailed in accounts from the Nobel Prize institution.
After earning his undergraduate and master's degrees in China, he moved to the United States after World War II with a fellowship at the University of Chicago.
During his time there, he was influenced by Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist credited with developing the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor.
From 1949 onward, Yang was affiliated with Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he attained a professorship in 1955.
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