Chen Ning Yang
Chen-Ning Franklin Yang (traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng) (born October 1, 1922[1]) is a Chinese-born American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He, together with Tsung-Dao Lee, received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction.
Biography
Yang was born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui, China, his father Yang Ko-Chuen (traditional Chinese: 杨武之; pinyin: Yáng Wǔzhī) (1896-1973) was a mathematician and his mother Luó Mènghuà (罗孟华) was a housewife. Yang attended elementary school and high school in Beijing, in the Autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after Japanese invaded China in full scale, in 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan where the National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied in National Southwestern Associated University. He received bachelor's degree in 1942, the thesis was about application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Wu Ta-You (吴大猷) (1907-2000). He continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Zhuxi (王竹溪) (1911~1983) working on statistical mechanics, in 1944 he received his master's degree. In the same year Yang achieved a special support funding between China and America (庚子赔款, known as Boxer Indemnity, restitution of part of war compensation of Eight-Country United Armies' Aggression in China) to study in America. But he was delayed for one year, during which time he taught in a middle school as a teacher and studied field theory.
From 1946, Yang studied in The University of Chicago with Edward Teller (1908-2003), where he received his doctorate in 1948 and remained for a year as assistant to Enrico Fermi. In 1949 he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study where he began a period of fruitful collaboration with T. D. Lee Tsung-Dao Lee. In 1966 he moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook and became the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics and the first director of a newly founded Institute for Theoretical Physics which is now known as C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He retired from Stony Brook in 1999 as Emeritus Professor.
He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院, Beijing ), the Academia Sinica (中央研究院, Taiwan), the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, etc. and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University (1958), Moscow State University (1992), Chinese University of Hong Kong (1997), etc.
Yang visited the Chinese mainland in 1971 for the first time after the thaw in China-US relations, and has subsequently made great efforts to help the Chinese physics community to rebuild research atmosphere which was destroyed by the radical political movements. After retiring from Stony Brook he returned as honorary director of Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is the Huang Jibei - Lu Kaiqun professor at the Center for Advanced Study (CASTU).
Yang married Chih-li Tu (traditional Chinese: 杜致禮; pinyin: Dù Zhìlǐ), a teacher, in 1950 and has two sons and a daughter: Franklin Jr., Gilbert, and Eulee (in order of age). His father-in-law was the Kuomintang General Du Yuming. His wife died in the winter of 2003. At the age of 82, Yang became engaged to 28-year old Weng Fan (simplified Chinese: 翁帆; pinyin: Wēng Fān) who was studying for her master's degree at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. They married in early 2005.
Academic achievements
Yang has worked on statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, particle physics and quantum field theory.
In 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 anglular distribution in nucleon reactions. Later he worked on particle phenomenology; a well known work was the Fermi-Yang model treating Pion meson as a bound nucleon-antinucleon pair. In 1956, he and T.D. Lee Tsung-Dao Lee proposed that in the weak interaction the parity symmetry was not conserved, Chien-Shiung Wu's team at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington experimentally verified the theory. Yang and Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their parity violation theory. Yang has also worked on neutrino theory(with T.D.Lee, 1957, 1959), CT nonconservation(with T.D.Lee and R.Oheme, 1957), electromagnetic interaction of vector mesons(with T.D.Lee, 1962), CP nonconservation(with Wu Tai-Tsun, 1964). It is well known that T. D. Lee fell out with Yang in 1962. Please refer to T.D Lee's publication in 2005 titled "Response to the Dispute of Discovery of Parity Violation" in Chinese ISBN 7542409298 (electronic download available online from T.D. Lee's homepage).
Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non Abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang-Mills theory. Such "Yang-Mills theories" are now a fundamental part of the Standard Model of particle physics. In the 1970s Yang worked on the topological properties of gauge theory, collaborating with Wu Tai-Tsun to elucidate the Wu-Yang monopole. Unlike the Dirac monopole, it has no singular Dirac string.
Yang has had a great interest in statistical mechanics since his undergraduate era, in the 1950s and 1960s, collaborated with Tsung-Dao Lee and Kerson Huang, etc. he studied statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory. He studied theory of phase transition and elucidated the Lee-Yang circle theorem, properties of quantum boson liquid, two dimensional Ising model, flux quantization in superconductors(with N. Byers, 1961), and proposed the concept of Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order(ODLRO, 1962). In 1967, he found a consistent condition for a one dimensional factorized scattering many body system, the equation was later named the Yang-Baxter equation, it plays an important role in integrable models and has influenced several branches of physics and mathematics.
Awards
- Nobel Prize in Physics (1957)
- Rumford Prize (1980)
- National Medal of Science (1986)
- Benjamin Franklin Medal (1993)
- Bower Award (1994)
- Albert Einstein Medal (1995)
- N. Bogoliubov Prize (1996)
- Lars Onsager Prize (1999)
- King Faisal International Prize (2001)
See also
Notes
- ↑ Bing-An Li, Yuefan Deng. "Biography of C.N. Yang" (PDF). Retrieved on 2007-09-11. "His birth date was erroneously recorded as September 22, 1922 in his 1945 passport. He has used this incorrect date on all subsequent official documents."
References
- Yang, C.N. (1952) [1952]. Special problems of statistical mechanics. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ASIN B0007FZHH4.
- Yang, C.N. (1963) [1961]. Elementary Particles: A Short History of Some Discoveries in Atomic Physics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ASIN B000E1CBGG.
- Yang, C.N. (1983) [1983]. Selected papers 1945-1980, with commentary (Chen Ning Yang). San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 071671406X.
- "C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP)". Retrieved on 2008-01-05.
External links
Nobel Laureates in Physics |
|
|
|
Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976–2000) | (2001–present)
|
|
National Medal of Science laureates |
|
Behavioral and social science |
|
1960s
|
1964: Roger Adams · Othmar H. Ammann · Theodosius Dobzhansky · Neal Elgar Miller
|
|
1980s
|
|
|
1990s
|
1990: Leonid Hurwicz · Patrick Suppes 1991: Robert W. Kates · George A. Miller 1992: Eleanor J. Gibson 1994: Robert K. Merton 1995: Roger N. Shepard 1996: Paul A. Samuelson 1997: William K. Estes 1998: William Julius Wilson 1999: Robert M. Solow
|
|
2000s
|
2000: Gary Becker 2001: George Bass 2003: R. Duncan Luce 2004: Kenneth Arrow 2005: Gordon H. Bower
|
|
|
|
Biological sciences |
|
1960s
|
1963: Cornelius Van Niel 1964: Marshall W. Nirenberg 1965: Francis P. Rous · George G. Simpson · Donald D. Van Slyke 1966: Edward F. Knipling · Fritz Albert Lipmann · William C. Rose · Sewall Wright 1967: Kenneth S. Cole · Harry F. Harlow · Michael Heidelberger · Alfred H. Sturtevant 1968: Horace Barker · Bernard B. Brodie · Detlev W. Bronk · Jay Lush · Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1969: Robert J. Huebner · Ernst Mayr
|
|
1970s
|
1970: Barbara McClintock · Albert B. Sabin 1973: Daniel I. Arnon · Earl W. Sutherland, Jr. 1974: Britton Chance · Erwin Chargaff · James V. Neel · James Augustine Hannon 1975: Hallowell Davis · Paul Gyorgy · Sterling Brown Hendricks · Orville lvin Vogel 1976: Roger C.L. Guillemin · Keith Roberts Porter · Efraim Racker · E. O. Wilson 1979: Robert H. Burris · Elizabeth C. Crosby · Arthur Kornberg · Severo Ochoa · Earl Reece Stadtman · George Ledyard Stebbins · Paul Alfred Weiss
|
|
1980s
|
1981: Philip Handler 1982: Seymour Benzer · Glenn W. Burton · Mildred Cohn 1983: Howard L. Bachrach · Paul Berg · Wendell L. Roelofs · Berta Scharrer 1986: Stanley Cohen · Donald A. Henderson · Vernon B. Mountcastle · George Emil Palade · Joan A. Steitz 1987: Michael E. Debakey · Theodor O. Diener · Harry Eagle · Har Gobind Khorana · Rita Levi-Montalcini 1988: Michael S. Brown · Stanley N. Cohen · Joseph L. Goldstein · Maurice R. Hilleman · Eric R. Kandel · Rosalyn S. Yalow 1989: Katherine Esau · Viktor Hamburger · Philip Leder · Joshua Lederberg · Roger W. Sperry · Harland G. Wood
|
|
1990s
|
1990: Baruj Benacerraf · Herbert W. Boyer · Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. · Edward B. Lewis · David G. Nathan · E. Donnall Thomas 1991: Mary Ellen Avery · G. Evelyn Hutchinson · Elvin A. Kabat · Salvador E. Luria · Paul A. Marks · Folke K Skoog · Paul C. Zamecnik 1992: Maxine Singer · Howard M. Temin 1993: Daniel Nathans · Salome G. Waelsch 1994: Thomas Eisner · Elizabeth F. Neufeld 1995: Alexander Rich 1996: Ruth Patrick 1997: James D. Watson · Robert A. Weinberg 1998: Bruce Ames · Janet Rowley 1999: David Baltimore · Jared Diamond · Lynn Margulis
|
|
2000s
|
2000: Nancy C. Andreasen · Peter H. Raven · Carl Woese 2001: Francisco J. Ayala · Mario R. Capecchi · Ann M. Graybiel · Gene E. Likens · Victor A. McKusick · Harold Varmus 2002: James E. Darnell · Evelyn M. Witkin 2003: J. Michael Bishop · Solomon H. Snyder · Charles Yanofsky 2004: Norman E. Borlaug · Phillip A. Sharp · Thomas E. Starzl 2005: Anthony Fauci · Torsten N. Wiesel 2006: Rita R. Colwell · Nina Fedoroff · Lubert Stryer
|
|
|
|
Chemistry |
|
1980s
|
1982: F. Albert Cotton · Gilbert Stork 1983: Roald Hoffmann · George C. Pimentel · Richard N. Zare 1986: Harry B. Gray · Yuan Tseh Lee · Carl S. Marvel · Frank H. Westheimer 1987: William S. Johnson · Walter H. Stockmayer · Max Tishler 1988: William O. Baker · Konrad E. Bloch · Elias J. Corey 1989: Richard B. Bernstein · Melvin Calvin · Rudoph A. Marcus · Harden M. McConnell
|
|
1990s
|
1990: Elkan Blout · Karl Folkers · John D. Roberts 1991: Ronald Breslow · Gertrude B. Elion · Dudley R. Herschbach · Glenn T. Seaborg 1992: Howard E. Simmons, Jr. 1993: Donald J. Cram · Norman Hackerman 1994: George S. Hammond 1995: Thomas Cech · Isabella L. Karle 1996: Norman Davidson 1997: Darleane C. Hoffman · Harold S. Johnston 1998: John W. Cahn · George M. Whitesides 1999: Stuart A. Rice · John Ross · Susan Solomon
|
|
2000s
|
2000: John D. Baldeschwieler · Ralph F. Hirschmann 2001: Ernest R. Davidson · Gabor A. Somorjai 2002: John I. Brauman 2004: Stephen J. Lippard 2006: Marvin H. Caruthers · Peter B. Dervan · Robert S. Langer
|
|
|
|
Engineering sciences |
|
1960s
|
|
|
1970s
|
1970: George E. Mueller 1973: Harold E. Edgerton · Richard T. Whitcomb 1974: Rudolf Kompfner · Ralph Brazelton Peck · Abel Wolman 1975: Manson Benedict · William Hayward Pickering · Frederick E. Terman · Wernher von Braun 1976: Morris Cohen · Peter C. Goldmark · Erwin Wilhelm Müller 1979: Emmett N. Leith · Raymond D. Mindlin · Robert N. Noyce · Earl R. Parker · Simon Ramo
|
|
1980s
|
1982: Edward H. Heinemann · Donald L. Katz 1983: William R. Hewlett · George M. Low · John G. Trump 1986: Hans Wolfgang Liepmann · T. Y. Lin · Bernard M. Oliver 1987: Robert B. Bird · H. Bolton Seed · Ernst Weber 1988: Daniel C. Drucker · Willis M. Hawkins · George W. Housner 1989: Harry George Drickamer · Herbert E. Grier
|
|
1990s
|
1990: Mildred S. Dresselhaus · Nick Holonyak Jr. 1991: George Heilmeier · Luna B. Leopold · H. Guyford Stever 1992: Calvin F. Quate · John Roy Whinnery 1993: Alfred Y. Cho 1994: Ray W. Clough 1995: Hermann A. Haus 1996: James L. Flanagan · C. Kumar N. Patel 1998: Eli Ruckenstein 1999: Kenneth N. Stevens
|
|
2000s
|
2000: Yuan-Cheng B. Fung 2001: Andreas Acrivos 2002: Leo Beranek 2003: John M. Prausnitz 2004: Edwin N. Lightfoot 2005: Jan D. Achenbach · Tobin J. Marks
|
|
|
|
Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences |
|
1960s
|
1963: Norbert Wiener 1964: Solomon Lefschetz · H. Marston Morse 1965: Oscar Zariski 1966: John Milnor 1967: Paul Cohen 1968: Jerzy Neyman 1969: William Feller
|
|
1970s
|
|
|
1980s
|
1982: Marshall Harvey Stone 1983: Herman Goldstine · Isadore Singer 1986: Peter Lax · Antoni Zygmund 1987: Raoul Bott · Michael Freedman 1988: Ralph E. Gomory · Joseph B. Keller 1989: Samuel Karlin · Saunders MacLane · Donald C. Spencer
|
|
1990s
|
1990: George F. Carrier · Stephen Cole Kleene · John McCarthy 1991: Alberto Calderón 1992: Allen Newell 1993: Martin Kruskal 1994: John Cocke 1995: Louis Nirenberg 1996: Richard M. Karp · Stephen Smale 1997: Shing-Tung Yau 1998: Cathleen Synge Morawetz 1999: Felix Browder · Ronald R. Coifman
|
|
2000s
|
2000: John Griggs Thompson · Karen K. Uhlenbeck 2001: Calyampudi R. Rao · Elias M. Stein 2002: James G. Glimm 2003: Carl R. de Boor 2004: Dennis P. Sullivan 2005: Bradley Efron 2006: Hyman Bass
|
|
|
|
Physical sciences |
|
1960s
|
|
|
1970s
|
1970: Robert H. Dicke · Allan R. Sandage · John C. Slater · John A. Wheeler · Saul Winstein 1973: Carl Djerassi · Maurice Ewing · Arie Jan Haagen-Smit · Vladimir Haensel · Frederick Seitz · Robert Rathbun Wilson 1974: Nicolaas Bloembergen · Paul Flory · William Alfred Fowler · Linus Carl Pauling · Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer 1975: Hans A. Bethe · Joseph Hirschfelder · Lewis Sarett · E. Bright Wilson · Chien-Shiung Wu 1976: Samuel Goudsmit · Herbert S. Gutowsky · Frederick Rossini · Verner Suomi · Henry Taube · George Uhlenbeck 1979: Richard P. Feynman · Herman Mark · Edward M. Purcell · John Sinfelt · Lyman Spitzer · Victor F. Weisskopf
|
|
1980s
|
1982: Philip W. Anderson · Yoichiro Nambu · Edward Teller · Charles H. Townes 1983: E. Margaret Burbidge · Maurice Goldhaber · Helmut Landsberg · Walter Munk · Frederick Reines · Bruno B. Rossi · J. Robert Schrieffer 1986: Solomon Buchsbaum · Horace Crane · Herman Feshbach · Robert Hofstadter · Chen Ning Yang 1987: Philip Abelson · Walter Elsasser · Paul C. Lauterbur · George Pake · James A. Van Allen 1988: D. Allan Bromley · Paul Ching-Wu Chu · Walter Kohn · Norman F. Ramsey · Jack Steinberger 1989: Arnold O. Beckman · Eugene Parker · Robert Sharp · Henry Stommel
|
|
1990s
|
1990: Allan M. Cormack · Edwin M. McMillan · Robert Pound · Roger Revelle 1991: Arthur L. Schawlow · Ed Stone · Steven Weinberg 1992: Eugene M. Shoemaker 1993: Val Fitch · Vera Rubin 1994: Albert Overhauser · Frank Press 1995: Hans Dehmelt · Peter Goldreich 1996: Wallace S. Broecker 1997: Marshall Rosenbluth · Martin Schwarzschild · George Wetherill 1998: Don L. Anderson · John N. Bahcall 1999: James Cronin · Leo Kadanoff
|
|
2000s
|
2000: Willis E. Lamb · Jeremiah P. Ostriker · Gilbert F. White 2001: Marvin L. Cohen · Raymond Davis Jr. · Charles Keeling 2002: Richard Garwin · W. Jason Morgan · Edward Witten 2003: G. Brent Dalrymple · Riccardo Giacconi 2004: Robert N. Clayton 2005: Ralph A. Alpher · Lonnie Thompson 2006: Daniel Kleppner
|
|
|
|
Persondata |
NAME |
Yang, Chen Ning Franklin |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
楊振寧 (Chinese) |
SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Nobel Prize-winning physicist |
DATE OF BIRTH |
October 1, 1922 |
PLACE OF BIRTH |
Hefei, Anhui, China |
DATE OF DEATH |
|
PLACE OF DEATH |
|