Yang Chen-Ning
Chinese physicist (1922–2025)
Yang Chen-Ning (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng; October 1, 1922 – October 18, 2025) also known as C.N. Yang and Franklin Yang, was a Chinese-American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, particle physics and condensed matter physics.
Yang is known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in 1954 in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory, which describes the nuclear forces in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of the weak interaction, which was confirmed by the Wu experiment in 1956. The two proposed that the conservation of parity, a physical law observed to hold in all other physical processes, is violated in weak nuclear reactions – those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta particles.
Early life and education
Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China, on October 1, 1922. His mother was Luo Meng-hua and his father, Ko-Chuen Yang (楊克純; 1896–1973), was a mathematician.
Yang attended elementary school and high school in Beiping (now 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 National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second-year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at National Southwestern Associated University. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1942, with his thesis on the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Ta-You Wu.
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