Chen Ning Yang, the renowned Chinese-American physicist and Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 103. State media outlet Xinhua reported that he died on Saturday in Beijing after an illness.
Born in Hefei, Anhui province, in 1922, Yang was best known for his work on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics. He shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died in 2024, for overthrowing the widely accepted 'parity laws' – the principle that the forces acting on fundamental subatomic particles are symmetric between left and right.
Yang grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University near Beijing, where his father was a professor of mathematics. After completing his undergraduate and master's degrees in China, he moved to the United States at the end of the Second World War on a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he was influenced by Professor Enrico Fermi.
From 1949, Yang was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, becoming a professor in 1955. In 2015, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that he had renounced his US citizenship.
