Yang was born inHefei,Anhui, China. His father,Ko-Chuen Yang [zh] (楊克純; 1896–1973), was a mathematician, and his mother, Meng Hwa Loh Yang (羅孟華), was a housewife.[citation needed]
Yang attended elementary school and high school inBeijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved toHefei after the Japaneseinvaded China. In 1938 they moved toKunming,Yunnan, whereNational 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,[2] with his thesis on the application ofgroup theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision ofTa-You Wu.
Yang continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision ofWang Zhuxi, working on statistical mechanics. In 1944, he received a Master of Science fromTsinghua University, which had moved to Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).[2] Yang was then awarded a scholarship from theBoxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, set up by the United States government using part of the money China had been forced to pay following theBoxer 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.[citation needed]
Yang remained at theUniversity of Chicago for a year as an assistant toEnrico Fermi. In 1949 he was invited to do his research at theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he began a period of fruitful collaboration withTsung-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 toStony 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 theC. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Yang retired fromStony 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.[4]
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 atmosphere[citation needed] which was destroyed by the radical political movements during theCultural Revolution. After retiring fromStony Brook, he returned as an honorary director ofTsinghua University, Beijing, where he is the Huang Jibei-Lu Kaiqun Professor at theCenter for Advanced Study (CASTU). He is also one of the twoShaw Prize Founding Members and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at theChinese University of Hong Kong.
Yang helped to establish the Theoretical Physics Division at theChern Institute of Mathematics in 1986 at the request ofShiing-Shen Chern who was serving as the inaugural director of the Institute at the time.[8][9]
Yang was the first president of the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) when it was established in 1989.[10] In 1997 the AAPPS created the C.N. Yang Award in his honor to highlight young researchers.[11]
Yang married Tu Chih-li (simplified Chinese:杜致礼;traditional Chinese:杜致禮;pinyin:Dù Zhìlǐ), a teacher, in 1950; they had two sons and a daughter together. His father-in-law was theKuomintang generalDu Yuming. Tu died in October 2003. In January 2005, Yang married Weng Fan (Chinese:翁帆;pinyin:Wēng Fān), 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".[12] Yang formally renounced his U.S. citizenship in late 2015.[13]
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 innuclear reactions.
Yang is well known for his 1953 collaboration withRobert Mills in developingnon-abeliangauge theory, widely known as theYang–Mills theory. The idea was generally conceived by Yang, and the novice scientist Mills assisted him in this endeavor as Mills said:[15]
During the academic year 1953-1954, Yang was a visitor toBrookhaven 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 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.[citation needed]
Later, Yang worked on particle phenomenology; a well-known work was the Fermi–Yang model treatingpion meson as a bound nucleon–anti-nucleon pair. In 1956, he and Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee proposed that in theweak interaction theparity 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 1957Nobel Prize in Physics for their parity violation theory, which brought revolutionary change to the field ofparticle physics.[3] Yang has also worked onneutrino theory with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee, 1957, 1959, CT nonconservation (with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee and R. Oheme, 1957), electromagnetic interaction ofvector mesons (with Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee, 1962),CP nonconservation withTai Tsun Wu (1964).
In the 1970s Yang worked on the topological properties of gauge theory, collaborating with Wu Tai-Tsun to elucidate theWu–Yang monopole. Unlike theDirac monopole, it has no singularDirac 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 andKerson Huang, etc. and studiedstatistical mechanics andcondensed matter theory. He studied the theory ofphase transition and elucidated theLee–Yang circle theorem, properties of quantumboson liquid, two dimensionalIsing model, flux quantization insuperconductors (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 theYang–Baxter equation, it plays an important role inintegrable models and has influenced several branches of physics and mathematics.
^abLi, Bing-An;Deng, Yuefan."Biography of C.N. Yang"(PDF). Retrieved11 September 2007.His birth date was erroneously recorded as September 22, 1922 in his 1945 passport. He has since used this incorrect date on all subsequent official documents.
Yang, C. N. (1963) [1961].Elementary Particles: A Short History of Some Discoveries in Atomic Physics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.ASINB000E1CBGG.
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