Renowned 1957 Nobel prize winner worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics
Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel prize winner, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after an illness, state media outlet Xinhua has reported.
Born in eastern China’s Hefei in Anhui province in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics.
Yang shared the 1957 Nobel prize for physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died in 2024.
They were awarded the prize for work that overthrew the widely accepted “parity laws” – that the forces acting on the fundamental subatomic particles are symmetric between left and right. In the popular description, they overthrew the concept of “mirror symmetry”.
