Yang Zhenning, a Nobel laureate in physics and professor at Tsinghua University in China, passed away on October 18.
Born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui Province, China, Dr. Yang graduated from the Department of Physics at the National Southwestern Associated University in 1942, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War. After earning his master’s degree from Tsinghua University in 1944, he went to the United States the following year and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1948.
His major research areas included particle physics, field theory, statistical physics, and condensed matter physics. Notably, the "Yang-Mills theory," which he proposed in 1954 together with Robert Mills in the United States, is regarded as one of the cornerstones of modern physics, considered a fundamental physical theory on par with Maxwell’s equations and Einstein’s theory of relativity.
In 1957, he became the first Nobel laureate in physics from the Chinese-speaking world, together with Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee (1926-2024), with whom he had studied at the National Southwestern Associated University and the University of Chicago, for establishing the "parity nonconservation theory," which explained cases where the symmetry of equations describing physical phenomena is not preserved.
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