Dr Chen Ning Yang--

Examining symmetry in nature

Yang served for a year as an instructor at UChicago before joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he worked alongside Robert Oppenheimer. In 1954, Yang worked with Robert Mills to develop the Yang-Mills theory, which describes the behavior of elementary particles and is the basis of our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Two years later Yang collaborated with fellow UChicago alum Lee, PhD 1950, on landmark research that would revolutionize the field of physics. Exploring long-held assumptions that the laws of physics were the same in a mirror image as in reality—and that all forces conserved parity—Yang and Lee proposed that parity might not hold for interactions with weak forces. A team led by Chien-Shiung Wu of Columbia University confirmed Lee and Yang's theory, observing that the decay of cobalt-60 did not happen in the exact same way as its mirror image—and that the left-right symmetry law was violated by the weak interaction.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/chen-ning-yang-world-renowned-physicist-and-nobel-laureate-1922-2025

For their breakthrough, Yang and Lee shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on parity laws, which the Foundation wrote “led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles.”

Deep devotion to China

A prolific author, Yang went on to make other important research contributions in statistical physics, quantum groups, and related fields of physics and mathematics, serving on the faculties of Stonybrook University and Tsinghua University. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Yang won numerous honors, including the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Albert Einstein Medal and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.