Chen Ning Yang, Nobel Prize winner and one of the world’s most influential physicists, has died at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media.
The obituary released by CCTV cited disease as the cause of death.
Yang and fellow theoretical physicist Lee Tsung-Dao shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the parity law. This led to important discoveries about elementary particles, the building blocks of matter.
Professor Yang was also a professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and honorary director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Born in 1922 in eastern China’s Anhui Province, he was the eldest of five children and grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University, where his father was a mathematics professor.
When Yang was a teenager, she told her parents, “I want to win the Nobel Prize someday.”
He achieved that dream at the age of 35, and was honored in 1957 for studying the law of equality with Lee.
The Nobel Committee praised “their insightful investigations that have led to important discoveries about elementary particles.”
Yang received a science degree from the National Southwest Union University in Kunming in 1942 and later a master’s degree from Tsinghua University.
After the Sino-Japanese War ended, he moved to the United States on a Tsinghua University scholarship to study at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist who invented the world’s first nuclear reactor.
During his prolific career he worked across all areas of physics, but maintained a special interest in the fields of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.
Professor Yang received the Albert Einstein Memorial Award in 1957 and an honorary doctorate from Princeton University in 1958.
Mr. Yang married his first wife, Chiritu, in 1950 and had three children.
After Tu’s death in 2003, Yang married his second wife, Weng Fan, who was more than 50 years his junior.
The pair first met in 1995 when Weng was a physics seminar student, and later reconnected in 2004.
At the time, Yang called her “God’s final blessing.”
