Chen Ning Yang

The son of a professor of mathematics of Tsinghua University, Dr. Yang was brought up in the peaceful and academically inclined atmosphere of the campus. He is a quiet, modest, and pleasant physicist, and also a hard-working person allowing himself very little leisure time. Among his many significant contributions to the field of physics, Yang proposed a theoretical framework that later became the basis of the present theory of the structure of matter at the smallest scales and highest energies. He worked together with Tsung Dao Lee and made a fundamental theoretical breakthrough in predicting that the law of conservation of parity would break down in the so-called weak interactions, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957.