{"id":208446,"date":"2025-10-18T08:41:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T08:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/208446\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T08:41:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T08:41:06","slug":"chen-ning-yang-chinese-nobel-prize-winning-physicist-dies-aged-103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/208446\/","title":{"rendered":"Chen Ning Yang: Chinese Nobel prize winning physicist dies aged 103"},"content":{"rendered":"

Born in 1922 in China’s eastern Anhui province, he was the oldest of five children and raised on the campus of Tsinghua University where his father was a professor of mathematics.<\/p>\n

As a teenager, Yang told his parents: “One day, I want to win the Nobel Prize.”<\/p>\n

He achieved that dream at the age of 35, when his work with Lee studying the law of parity earned them the honour in 1957.<\/p>\n

The Nobel committee praised “their penetrating investigation… which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles”.<\/p>\n

Yang received his science degree in 1942 from National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, and later completed a master’s degree at Tsinghua University.<\/p>\n

At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he travelled to the US on a fellowship from Tsinghua and studied at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, inventor of the world’s first nuclear reactor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Throughout a prolific career, he worked across all areas of physics, but maintained particular interest in the fields of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.<\/p>\n

Yang received the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in 1957 and was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University in 1958.<\/p>\n

Yang married his first wife Chih Li Tu in 1950, with whom he had three children.<\/p>\n

After Tu’s death in 2003, Yang married his second wife Weng Fan, who is more than 50 years his junior.<\/p>\n

The pair had first met in 1995 when Weng was a student in a physics seminar, and later reconnected in 2004. <\/p>\n

At the time, Yang called her his “final blessing from God”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born in 1922 in China’s eastern Anhui province, he was the oldest of five children and raised on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[2302,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-208446","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}