Physics is a science that has made rapid progress in the twentieth century ... I desire, as I did in the past, to be a traveler in a strange land and a colonist in a new country. (from the foreword to his autobiography)
He was born asHideki Ogawa inTokyo and grew up inKyoto with two older brothers, two older sisters, and two younger brothers.[2] He read the ConfucianDoctrine of the Mean, and laterLao-Tzu andChuang-Tzu. His father, for a time, considered sending him to technical college rather than university since he was "not as outstanding a student as his older brothers". However, when his father broached the idea with his middle school principal, the principal praised his "high potential" in mathematics and offered to adopt Ogawa himself in order to keep him on a scholarly career. At that, his father relented.
Ogawa decided against becoming a mathematician when in high school; his teacher marked his exam answer as incorrect when Ogawa proved a theorem but in a different manner than the teacher expected.[2] He decided against a career in experimental physics in college when he demonstrated clumsiness in glassblowing, a requirement for experiments inspectroscopy.[2]
In 1932, he married Sumi Yukawa (スミ). In accordance with Japanese customs (seemukoyoshi), since he came from a family with many sons but his father-in-law Genyo had none, he was adopted by Genyo and changed his family name from Ogawa to Yukawa.[2] The couple had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. In 1933 he became a lecturer atOsaka Imperial University, at 26 years old.
In 1935 he published his theory ofmesons, which explained the interaction betweenprotons andneutrons atOsaka Imperial University, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles.[3]
In 1938, he received hisPh.D. degree atOsaka Imperial University for his predictions regarding the existence of mesons and his theoretical work on the nature of nuclear forces.[4][5] These research achievements were the reason he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
[Once I had published my seminal 1934 paper on particle interaction] I felt like a traveler who rests himself at a small tea shop at the top of a mountain slope. At that time I was not thinking about whether there were any more mountains ahead. [conclusion of his autobiography]
He was an editor ofProgress of Theoretical Physics,[7] and published the booksIntroduction to Quantum Mechanics (1946) andIntroduction to the Theory of Elementary Particles (1948).
Yukawa retired from Kyoto University in 1970 as a Professor Emeritus. Owing to increasing infirmity, in his final years he appeared in public in a wheelchair. He died at his home in Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, on 8 September 1981 from pneumonia and heart failure, aged 74. His tomb is inHigashiyama-ku, Kyoto.
^abSegré, Emilio (1987) "K-Electron Capture by Nuclei", pp. 11–12, chapter 3 inDiscovering Alvarez: selected works of Luis W. Alvarez, with commentary by his students and colleagues, Luis W. Alvarez and W. Peter Trower, University of Chicago Press.ISBN0-226-81304-5.
^abYukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics; Gakkai, Nihon Butsuri (1946).Progress of Theoretical Physics. Kyoto: Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics and Physical Society of Japan.OCLC44519062. Archived fromthe original on 3 February 2002. Retrieved3 March 2008.
