Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Dies at 103

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Chen-Ning Yang died on October 18 in Beijing. He made multiple contributions to the fields of gauge theory, particle physics, condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics and integrable systems.

In 1957, Yang shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Tsung-Dao Lee for their work that disproved the notion that our universe and a mirrored universe should have precisely the same physics. Experiments led by physicist Chien-Shiung Wu later confirmed this violation of the conservation of parity in the weak interaction.

In February 2011, Yang sat down for an interview about his life and career for the Simons Foundation’s Science Lives project. In the interview, he talked about his time as the inaugural head of the physics department at Stony Brook University, where he worked from 1965 until his retirement in 1999. In his early years as department chair, Yang worked with Simons Foundation co-founder Jim Simons, who joined Stony Brook as director of the university’s math department in 1968.

The pair quickly found common ground and began collaborating, though not through science at first. Yang recalled that Simons approached him about starting an anti-war fund on the campus in opposition to the Vietnam War. Stony Brook ultimately raised more money than any other university, Yang said. Later, Yang and Simons found deep connections between Yang’s research in physics and Simons’ work in geometry.

“The rules of how to construct the universe [are] deeply mathematical, which mathematicians can get down to without contact with reality,” Yang said during the 2011 interview. “They just started with 1, 2, 3, 4 and got there.”