Lee has four brothers and one sister. EducatorRobert C. T. Lee was one of T. D.'s brothers.[6] Lee's mother Chang and brother Robert C. T. moved toTaiwan in the 1950s.[citation needed]
Lee received his secondary education in Shanghai (High School Affiliated to Soochow University, 東吳大學附屬中學) andJiangxi (Jiangxi Joint High School, 江西聯合中學). Due to theSecond Sino-Japanese war, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he did not obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly applied to and was admitted by the National Chekiang University (nowZhejiang University). Initially, Lee registered as a student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Very quickly, Lee's talent was discovered and his interest in physics grew rapidly. Several physics professors, includingShu Xingbei andWang Ganchang, largely guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics ofNational Che Kiang University, where he studied in 1943–1944.[5][additional citation(s) needed]
Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in the United States. In 1946, Lee went to theUniversity of Chicago and was selected by ProfessorEnrico Fermi to become his PhD student. Lee received his PhD under Fermi in 1950 for his research workHydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars. Lee served as research associate and lecturer in physics at theUniversity of California at Berkeley from 1950 to 1951.[7][5]
In 1953, Lee joinedColumbia University, where he remained until retirement. His first work at Columbia was on a solvable model ofquantum field theory better known as the Lee model. Soon, his focus turned toparticle physics and the developing puzzle ofK meson decays. Lee realized in early 1956 that the key to the puzzle was parity non-conservation. At Lee's suggestion, the first experimental test was onhyperon decay by the Steinberger group. At that time, the experimental result gave only an indication of a 2 standard deviation effect of possibleparity violation. Encouraged by this feasibility study, Lee made a systematic study of possible Time reversal (T), Parity (P), Charge Conjugation (C), andCP violations inweak interactions with collaborators, including C. N. Yang. After the definitive experimental confirmation byChien-Shiung Wu and her assistants that showed that parity was not conserved, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wu was not awarded the Nobel prize, which is considered one of the largest controversies in Nobel committee history.[8]
In the early 1960s, Lee and collaborators initiated the important field of high-energyneutrino physics. In 1964, Lee, with M. Nauenberg, analyzed the divergences connected with particles of zero rest mass, and described a general method known as theKLN theorem for dealing with these divergences, which still plays an important role in contemporary work in QCD, with its massless, self-interacting gluons. In 1974–75, Lee published several papers on "A New Form of Matter in High Density", which led to the modern field of RHIC physics, now dominating the entire high-energynuclear physics field.[citation needed]
Besidesparticle physics, Lee was active instatistical mechanics,astrophysics,hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, and lattice QCD. In 1983, Lee wrote a paper entitled, "Can Time Be a Discrete Dynamical Variable?"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations. Beginning in 1975, Lee and collaborators established the field of non-topological solitons, which led to his work on soliton stars andblack holes throughout the 1980s and 1990s.[citation needed]
From 1997 to 2003, Lee was director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (now director emeritus), which together with other researchers from Columbia, completed a 1 teraflops supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD in 1998 and a 10 teraflopsQCDOC machine in 2001.[citation needed] Leading up to 2005,[9] Lee andRichard M. Friedberg developed a new method to solve theSchrödinger equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other instanton problems. They also did work on the neutrino mapping matrix.[10]
Soon after the re-establishment of China-Americanrelations with the PRC, Lee and his wife, Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin (秦惠䇹;Qín Huìjūn), were able to go to the PRC, where Lee gave a series of lectures and seminars, and organized theCUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application).
In 1998, Lee established the Chun-Tsung Endowment (秦惠䇹—李政道中国大学生见习基金) in memory of his wife, who had died three years earlier. The Chun-Tsung scholarships, supervised by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (New York), are awarded to undergraduates, usually in their 2nd or 3rd year, at six universities, which areShanghai Jiaotong University,Fudan University,Lanzhou University,Soochow University,Peking University, andTsinghua University. Students selected for such scholarships are named "Chun-Tsung Scholars" (䇹政学者).
Lee and Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin married in 1950 and had two sons: James Lee (Chinese:李中清;pinyin:Lǐ Zhōngqīng) andStephen Lee (Chinese:李中汉;pinyin:Lǐ Zhōnghàn). His wife died in 1996.[5]
Tsung-Dao Lee died in San Francisco on August 4, 2024, at the age of 97.[5][12][13]
Marcel Grossmann Awards (2015), "for his work on white dwarfs motivating Enrico Fermi’s return to astrophysics and guiding the basic understanding of neutron star matter and fields"[14]
Lee, T.D. (2000).Science and Art. Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publisher.ISBN978-7-5323-5609-6.
Lee, T.D. (2002).The Challenge from Physics. Beijing: China Economics Publisher.ISBN978-7-5017-5622-3.
Lee, T.D.; Cheng, Ji; Huaizu, Liu; Li, Teng (2004).Response to the Dispute of Discovery of Parity Violation (in Chinese). Lanzhou, Gansu: Gansu Science and Technology Publishing House.ISBN978-7-5424-0929-4.
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