Chen-Ning Yang

Happy birthday Chen-Ning Yang! Born in 1922 in Hefei, China, Yang was able to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China, despite the Japanese invasion. In 1946 he began his PhD at the University of Chicago under Edward Teller. Ten years later, when Yang was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, he and Tsung-Dao Lee predicted that the weak interaction does not conserve parity. Within a year Chien-Shiung Wu and her colleagues had performed an experiment at the National Bureau of Standards that verified Lee and Yang’s prediction. The two theorists were promptly awarded the Nobel physics prize. Among Yang’s other notable contributions to physics is the quantum field theory that he and Robert Mills developed in 1954. Yang-Mills theory proved to be a rich line of research. Electroweak unification, quantum chromodynamics and Standard Model of particle physics all rest on its foundations.

Date in History: 1 October 1922