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Hideki Yukawa was born on 23 January 1907 inTokyo, Japan, and grew up inKyoto with two older brothers, two older sisters, and two younger brothers.[4] 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.[5]
Ogawa decided against becoming a mathematician when his high school teacher marked his exam answer as incorrect when Ogawa proved a theorem but in a different manner than the teacher expected. He decided against a career in experimental physics in college when he demonstrated clumsiness in glassblowing, a requirement for experiments inspectroscopy.[4]
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)
In 1935, Yukawa published his theory ofmesons, which explained the interaction betweenprotons andneutrons at Osaka Imperial University, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles.[6]
In 1938, Yukawa received a doctorate from Osaka Imperial University for his predictions regarding the existence of mesons and his theoretical work on the nature ofnuclear forces.[7][8] These research achievements were the reason he was later awarded theNobel Prize in Physics.
In 1939, Yukawa was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics atKyoto Imperial University. In 1949, he became a visiting professor atColumbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics—after the discovery byCecil Powell,Giuseppe Occhialini, andCésar Lattes of Yukawa's predictedpi meson in 1947. Yukawa also worked on the theory ofK-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus, after its initial prediction byG. C. Wick.[9]
[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]
In 1946, Yukawa founded the journalProgress of Theoretical Physics,[10] and published the booksIntroduction to Quantum Mechanics (1946) andIntroduction to the Theory of Elementary Particles (1948).
In 1953, Yukawa became the first Director of the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics (now theYukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics), a position he held until his retirement in 1970.
In 1932, he married Sumi Yukawa (スミ). In accordance with Japanese customs (seeMukoyōshi), 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.[4] The couple had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki.
^Segré, 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.
^Yukawa 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.
