Nobel Prize-winning Chinese physicist dies at 103

Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel laureate and one of the world’s most influential physicists, has died at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media.

An obituary published by CCTV listed illness as the cause of death.

Yang and his fellow theoretical physicist, Lee Tsung-Dao, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work in the laws of parity, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles – the building blocks of matter.

Yang was also a professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and dean emeritus of the institution’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

Born in 1922 in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, he was the eldest of five children and grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University, where his father was a mathematics professor.

As a teenager, Yang told his parents, “One day I want to win the Nobel Prize.”

He achieved that dream at the age of 35 when his work with Lee on the study of the parity law earned them the honor in 1957.

The Nobel committee praised “their thorough research… which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles”.

Yang received his science degree in 1942 from the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, and later completed his master’s degree at Tsinghua University.

At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he traveled to the United States on a scholarship from Tsinghua and studied at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, inventor of the world’s first nuclear reactor.

During his prolific career, he worked in all areas of physics, but maintained a special interest in statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.

Yang received the Albert Einstein Memorial Award in 1957 and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Princeton University in 1958.

Yang married his first wife Chi Li Tu in 1950, with whom he had three children.

After Tu’s death in 2003, Yang married his second wife, Wen Fan, who was more than 50 years his junior.

The two first met in 1995 when Weng was a student in a physics seminar, and later reconnected in 2004.

At the time, Yang called her his “last blessing from God.”