Yoichiro Nambu

On this day was born Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎 18 January 1921 – 5 July 2015). Originally from Tokyo, Japan, he enrolled in the Imperial University of Tokyo and studied physics, receiving his Bachelor of Science in 1942. He was an associate professor at the Osaka City University (1949) and promoted to professorship the following year. In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and later chaired the Physics Dept (1974-77). He became a naturalized US citizen in 1970 Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction’s chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism. The other half was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.”

Date in History: 18 January 1921