Yang Zhenning (楊振寧, 103), a Tsinghua University professor and the first person of Chinese descent to win a Nobel Prize, died on the 18th, Xinhua reported.
In 1957, Yang jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics with Dr. Li Zhengdao for research proving that the law of parity conservation may not hold in all processes of nature.
The discovery is regarded as an achievement that greatly changed the understanding of the fundamental structure of particle physics. At the time, the Nobel Committee called it "insightful research that led to important discoveries about elementary particles."
Born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui, China, Professor Yang devoted himself to scholarship despite the turmoil of the Sino-Japanese War. He graduated from the Department of Physics at the National Southwestern Associated University in 1942, earned a master's degree from Tsinghua University in 1944, then went to the United States and received a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1948. He studied under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who invented the world's first nuclear reactor.
Right after receiving his doctorate in 1949, Professor Yang began research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was appointed a professor in 1955. From 1966 to 1999, he served as a distinguished professor at the State University of New York and as the inaugural director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Yang Zhenning Institute for Theoretical Physics). He also devoted himself to mentoring younger scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University.
His research left a deep mark across modern physics, including particle physics, field theory, statistical physics, and condensed matter physics. In particular, the Yang-Mills theory he presented in 1954 with American physicist Robert Mills became a core foundation of today's Standard Model of particle physics and is regarded as an achievement comparable to Maxwell's equations and Einstein's theory of relativity. The Yang-Baxter equation he proposed later had a major impact on various studies in physics and mathematics.
Through its official social media, Tsinghua University paid tribute, saying, "Yang Zhenning was a bridge spanning two centuries, connecting China and the West, and an immortal legend reaching toward the unknown," adding, "He described his life as 'a single circle.' Starting from Tsinghua, he traveled the world and returned to the embrace of his homeland, completing a full cycle."