Yang Chen-Ning

His father, Yang Ko-Chuen (楊克純; 1896–1973), was a mathematician, and his mother, Meng Hwa Loh Yang (羅孟華), was a housewife.

Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang (born 1 October 1922), also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics.

Yang attended elementary school and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China.

In 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where National Southwestern Associated University was located.

In the same year, as a second year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at National Southwestern Associated University.

He received a Bachelor of Science in 1942, with his thesis on the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Ta-You Wu.

Yang continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Zhuxi, working on statistical mechanics.

In 1944, he received a Master of Science from Tsinghua University, which had moved to Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).

Yang was then awarded a scholarship from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, set up by the United States government using part of the money China had been forced to pay following the Boxer Rebellion.

His departure for the United States was delayed for one year, during which time he taught in a middle school as a teacher and studied field theory.

Yang entered the University of Chicago in January 1946 and studied with Edward Teller.

He received a Doctor of Philosophy in 1948.

Yang remained at the University of Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi.

In 1949 he was invited to do his research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he began a period of fruitful collaboration with Tsung-Dao Lee.

Yang married Chih-Li Tu, a teacher, in 1950 and has two sons and a daughter with her: Franklin Jr., Gilbert and Eulee.

His father-in-law was the Kuomintang general Du Yuming.

Some scholars suspect that Du was promoted to a high-ranking position in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in order to convince Yang to return to China after seeking refuge in the US.

He was made a permanent member of the Institute in 1952, and full professor in 1955.

Yang is well known for his 1953 collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory.

He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction.

The two proposed that one of the basic quantum-mechanics laws, the conservation of parity, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles.

Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory.

Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China.

He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by Princeton University (1958), Moscow State University (1992), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1997).

In 1963, Princeton University Press published his textbook, Elementary Particles.

In 1965 he moved to Stony Brook University, where he was named the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics and the first director of the newly founded Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Today this institute is known as the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Yang visited the Chinese mainland in 1971 for the first time after the thaw in China–US relations, and has subsequently worked to help the Chinese physics community rebuild the research atmosphere which was destroyed by the radical political movements during the Cultural Revolution.

After retiring from Stony Brook he returned as an honorary director of Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is the Huang Jibei-Lu Kaiqun Professor at the Center for Advanced Study (CASTU).

He is also one of the two Shaw Prize Founding Members and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Yang retired from Stony Brook University in 1999, assuming the title Emeritus Professor.

Tu died in October 2003, and in December 2004 the then 82-year-old Yang caused a stir by marrying the then 28-year-old Weng Fan, calling Weng the "final blessing from God".

In 2010, Stony Brook University honored Yang's contributions to the university by naming its newest dormitory building C. N. Yang Hall.

Yang has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society.

He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Yang formally renounced his U.S. citizenship in late 2015.

On 1 October 2022, Yang became a centenarian.

Yang has worked on statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, particle physics and gauge theory/quantum field theory.

At the University of Chicago, Yang first spent twenty months working in an accelerator lab, but he later found he was not as good as an experimentalist and switched back to theory.

His doctoral thesis was about angular distribution in nuclear reactions.