Incubator escapee wiki

Yang Chen-Ning

Article Discussion
(Redirected from C. N. Yang)

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Family name hatnote Template:Infobox scientist Template:Modern physics

Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang (Template:Zh; born 1 October 1922),<ref name="birthdate">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang,<ref name="npbio">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics<ref name="np">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that the conservation of parity, a physical law observed to hold in all other physical processes, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles. Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory.

Early life and educationEdit

Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China. His father, Template:Ill ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}; 1896–1973), was a mathematician, and his mother, Meng Hwa Loh Yang ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}), was a housewife.Template:Cn

Yang attended elementary school and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China. In 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second-year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at National Southwestern Associated University. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1942,<ref name="npbio" /> with his thesis on the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Ta-You Wu.

Yang continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Zhuxi, working on statistical mechanics. In 1944, he received a Master of Science from Tsinghua University, which had moved to Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).<ref name="npbio" /> Yang was then awarded a scholarship from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, set up by the United States government using part of the money China had been forced to pay following the Boxer Rebellion. His departure for the United States was delayed for one year, during which time he taught in a middle school as a teacher and studied field theory.Template:Cn

Yang entered the University of Chicago in January 1946 and studied with Edward Teller. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in 1948.<ref name="npbio" />

CareerEdit

Yang remained at the University of Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi. In 1949 he was invited to do his research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he began a period of fruitful collaboration with Tsung-Dao Lee. He was made a permanent member of the Institute in 1952, and full professor in 1955. In 1963, Princeton University Press published his textbook, Elementary Particles. In 1965 he moved to Stony Brook University, where he was named the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics and the first director of the newly founded Institute for Theoretical Physics. Today this institute is known as the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Yang retired from Stony Brook University in 1999, assuming the title emeritus Professor. In 2010, Stony Brook University honored Yang's contributions to the university by naming its newest dormitory building C. N. Yang Hall.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Yang has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> the American Philosophical Society,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and the United States National Academy of Sciences.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by Princeton University (1958), Moscow State University (1992), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1997).

Yang visited the Chinese mainland in 1971 for the first time after the thaw in China–US relations, and has subsequently worked to help the Chinese physics community rebuild the research atmosphereTemplate:Citation needed which was destroyed by the radical political movements during the Cultural Revolution. After retiring from Stony Brook, he returned as an honorary director of Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is the Huang Jibei-Lu Kaiqun Professor at the Center for Advanced Study (CASTU). He is also one of the two Shaw Prize Founding Members and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Yang helped to establish the Theoretical Physics Division at the Chern Institute of Mathematics in 1986 at the request of Shiing-Shen Chern who was serving as the inaugural director of the Institute at the time.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Yang was the first president of the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) when it was established in 1989.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 1997 the AAPPS created the C.N. Yang Award in his honor to highlight young researchers.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Personal lifeEdit

Yang married Tu Chih-li (Template:Zh), a teacher, in 1950; they had two sons and a daughter together. His father-in-law was the Kuomintang general Du Yuming. Tu died in October 2003. In January 2005, Yang married Weng Fan (Template:Zh), a university student. They met in 1995 at a physics seminar; the couple reestablished contact in February 2004. Yang called Weng, who is 54 years his junior, his "final blessing from God".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Yang formally renounced his U.S. citizenship in late 2015.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

On 1 October 2022, Yang became a centenarian.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Academic achievementsEdit

Yang has worked on statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, particle physics and gauge theory/quantum field theory.

At the University of Chicago, Yang first spent twenty months working in an accelerator lab, but he later found he was not as good as an experimentalist and switched back to theory. His doctoral thesis was about angular distribution in nuclear reactions.

Yang is well known for his 1953 collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory. The idea was generally conceived by Yang, and the novice scientist Mills assisted him in this endeavor as Mills said:<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

During the academic year 1953-1954, Yang was a visitor to Brookhaven National Laboratory...I was at Brookhaven also...and was assigned to the same office as Yang. Yang, who has demonstrated on a number of occasions his generosity to physicists beginning their careers, told me about his idea of generalizing gauge invariance and we discussed it at some length...I was able to contribute something to the discussions, especially with regard to the quantization procedures, and to a small degree in working out the formalism; however, the key ideas were Yang's.

The Yang-Mills theory was called by The Scientist:<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web

}}</ref>

The foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics.

Subsequently, in the last three decades, many other prominent scientists have developed key breakthroughs to what is now known as gauge theory.Template:Cn

Later, Yang worked on particle phenomenology; a well-known work was the Fermi–Yang model treating pion meson as a bound nucleon–anti-nucleon pair. In 1956, he and Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee proposed that in the weak interaction the parity symmetry was not conserved, Chien-shiung Wu's team at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington experimentally verified the theory. Yang and Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their parity violation theory, which brought revolutionary change to the field of particle physics.<ref name="np" /> Yang has also worked on neutrino theory with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee, 1957, 1959, CT nonconservation (with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee and R. Oheme, 1957), electromagnetic interaction of vector mesons (with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee, 1962), CP nonconservation with Tai Tsun Wu (1964).

In the 1970s Yang worked on the topological properties of gauge theory, collaborating with Wu Tai-Tsun to elucidate the Wu–Yang monopole. Unlike the Dirac monopole, it has no singular Dirac string.

Yang has had a great interest in statistical mechanics since his undergraduate time. In the 1950s and 1960s, he collaborated with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee and Kerson Huang, etc. and studied statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory. He studied the theory of phase transition and elucidated the Lee–Yang circle theorem, properties of quantum boson liquid, two dimensional Ising model, flux quantization in superconductors (with N. Byers, 1961), and proposed the concept of Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order (ODLRO, 1962). In 1967, he found a consistent condition for a one-dimensional factorized scattering many-body system, the equation was later named the Yang–Baxter equation, it plays an important role in integrable models and has influenced several branches of physics and mathematics.

Awards and honorsEdit

Template:Multiple image

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Selected publicationsEdit

See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

CitationsEdit

Template:Reflist

SourcesEdit

Template:Refbegin

|CitationClass=web }}

Template:Refend

External linksEdit

Template:Sister project Template:Sister project

|CitationClass=web }}

Template:Nobel Prize in Physics Laureates 1951–1975 Template:1957 Nobel Prize winners Template:Ethnic Chinese Nobel laureates Template:Winners of the National Medal of Science Template:FRS 1992

Template:Portal bar Template:Touching the Heart of China Template:Authority control

Retrieved from "https://zalansite.site/mediawiki/index.php?title=Yang_Chen-Ning&oldid=169722"