Chen-Ning Yang 楊振寧, Nobel Prize in Physics 1957

Chen-Ning "Frank" Yang 楊振寧, is a Chinese-American physicist who works on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. The most important work of Yang, however, is Yang-Mills theory.

Biography

Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China; his father, Yang Wu-Chih (楊武之) (1896–1973), was a mathematician, and his mother, Luo Meng-hua (羅孟華), was a housewife. Yang attended elementary school and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China. 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 at the National Southwestern Associated University. He received his bachelor's degree in 1942, with his thesis on the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Ta-You Wu. He continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Zhuxi, working on statistical mechanics. In 1944 he received his master's degree from Tsinghua University, which had moved to Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and was subsequently awarded from the Boxer Indemnity, a scholarship set up by the United States government using part of the money from which China had been forced to pay following the Boxer Rebellion. 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 at 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 Tsung-Dao Lee. From 1948 to 1949, when he was invited to do his research at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was made a permanent member of the institute in 1952 and full professor in 1955. In 1965 he was named Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as the compliment of his and his comrade works. 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. In 2010, Stony Brook University honored Yang's contributions to the university by naming its newest dormitory building CN Yang Hall.

He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, 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 the research atmosphere which was destroyed by the radical political movements during the Cultural Revolution. 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). He also sits on the Board of Adjudicators for the Shaw Prize and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Personal life

Yang married Chih-li Tu (Chinese: 杜致禮; pinyin: Dù Zhìlǐ), a teacher, in 1950 and has two sons and a daughter with her: Franklin Jr., Gilbert and Eulee. His father-in-law was a Kuomintang Army General Du Yuming who was taken POW at the end of Chinese civil war. First wife Tu died in the winter of 2003. Yang married Weng Fan (Chinese: 翁帆; pinyin: Wēng Fān) in December 2004.

Yang became a U.S. citizen in 1964. He now resides in China, and he was granted permanent residency in China in 2005.

On Yang's religious views, he is an agnostic.