Background

Yang was born in the city of Hofei, in the Anhui province of China, on September 22, 1922, the son of Ke Chuan Yang, a professor of mathematics, and the former Meng Hwa Loh. The Yang family moved in 1929 from Hofei to Beijing, where Professor Yang took a job with Tsinghua University.

Education

In Beijing, Yang attended the Chung Te Middle School. His family moved once more eight years later to escape the invading Japanese army. At that time, Tsinghua University was moved to K’un-ming, where it was consolidated with National Southwest Associated University. When Yang finished high school, he entered the National Southwest Associated University, where he majored in physics and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1942.

He then continued his studies at Tsinghua University, where his father was still professor of mathematics. Yang earned his Master of Science degree at Tsinghua in 1944. He then taught high school for one year before deciding to begin work on Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics. Because doctoral programs in physics were not then available in China, Yang decided to come to the United States, where he particularly wanted to study with physicist Enrico Fermi. According to an article by Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker, Yang traveled to New York City (by way of India, the Suez Canal, and Europe) under the impression that Fermi was still at Columbia, where he had come upon his arrival in the United States in 1938. When Yang heard that Fermi had only recently left for a new post at the University of Chicago, he followed Fermi and enrolled in the doctoral program at Chicago. Yang received his doctorate in 1948.

Yang has honorary doctorates from Princeton University, Polytechnic Institute, University of Wroclaw, Gustavus Adolphus College, University of Maryland, University of Durham, Fundan University, Eidg Technische Hochschule and Moscow State University.

Career

During Yang’s tenure at Chicago, he developed the association with fellow student Tsung-Dao Lee. The situation at Chicago was very different. In 1948 he remained at Chicago as an instructor for one year and then took a job at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as a member at first, becoming a professor in 1955, he remained there until 1966.

In 1951 Lee joined Yang at Princeton for a period of two years. When Lee then took a job at Columbia University in 1953, the two agreed to continue meeting once each week, alternating between New York and Princeton. By the spring of 1956 they had settled on a problem of particular interest to both of them, the decay of the K-meson (a subatomic particle) and the question of parity conservation.

Experiments appear to have shown that K-mesons can decay in one of two ways. The explanation that had been postulated for this observation was that two kinds of K-mesons exist; Yang and Lee suggested another possibility. Perhaps only one form of the K-meson exists, they said, and it sometimes decays in such a way that parity is conserved and sometimes in such a way that parity is not conserved. In June of 1956 Yang and Lee formulated their thoughts on the K-meson puzzle in a now-classic paper titled “Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions.” They not only explained why they thought that parity conservation might not occur, but they also outlined experimental tests by which their hypothesis could be evaluated.

Within a matter of months, the proposed experiments were under way. They were carried out by a group of researchers under the direction of Chien-Shiung Wu, a compatriot of Yang and Lee at Columbia University. Wu assembled a team of colleagues at Columbia and at the National Bureau of Standards to study K-meson decay along the lines suggested by Yang and Lee. By January of 1957, the preliminary results were in. The evidence confirmed that Yang and Lee were correct: parity was not conserved in the decay of K-mesons.

In the mid-1960s, Yang ended his long affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study to accept an appointment as Albert Einstein Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He began to hold two positions in 1966 - the first, as a professor of Physics at the State University of New York, and the second, as a director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Today this institute is known as the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He retired from Stony Brook University in 1999, assuming the title Emeritus Professor.

After retiring from Stony Brook he returned as an honorary director of Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is the Huang Jibei-Lu Kaiqun Professor at the Center for Advanced Study (CASTU). He is also one of the two Shaw Prize Founding Members and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Yang was granted permanent residency in China in 2004. But he renounced his U.S. citizenship as of September 30, 2015 and reclaimed his Chinese citizenship.

Achievements

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  For their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction, in 1957 Yang and Lee were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics only ten months after Wu’s experiments had been completed—almost record time for recognition by a Nobel Prize committee.
  
  In addition to the Nobel Prize, Yang has been awarded the 1957 Albert Einstein Commemorative Award and the 1980 Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  
  Six years later he received National Medal of Science, as well as several other awards.
  
  In 2010, Stony Brook University honored Yang's contributions to the university by naming its newest dormitory building C. N. Yang Hall.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Elementary Particles: A Short History of Some Discoveries in Atomic Physics (The Vanuxem Lectures, 1959)

    (When in 1957 Chen Ning Yang, with his colleague Tsung Dao...)

  • Lee Kuan Yew Through the Eyes of Chinese Scholars

    (Lee Kuan Yew through the Eyes of Chinese Scholars is a co...)

  • Braid Group, Knot Theory and Statistical Mechanics II (Advanced Series in Mathematical Physics) (v. 2)

    (The present volume is an updated version of the book edit...)

  • Selected Papers of Chen Ning Yang II - With Commentaries
  • Braid Group, Knot Theory and Statistical Mechanics (Advanced Series in Mathematical Physics)

Religion

Yang is an agnostic.

Membership

Yang was a member of such organizations and societies as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in London.

Connections

In 1950 Yang married Chih Li Tu, a former high school student of his in China. They have two sons, Franklin and Gilbert, and a daughter, Eulee.

After his wife died in the winter of 2003, Yang married the then 28-year-old Weng Fan in December 2004.

Father:

Ke Chuan Yang

Mother:

Meng Hwa Loh

1-st wife:

Chih Li Tu

Son:

Franklin Yang

Son:

Gilbert Yang

Daughter:

Eulee Yang

2-nd wife:

Weng Fan