Chen Ning Yang, one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century and laureate in 1957, died at the age of 103 in Beijing, according to information from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. The cause of death was illness, although additional details were not released.
Born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui Province, China, Yang was a physicist who left a remarkable legacy in subatomic particle physics. He is co-author of the Yang-Mills gauge theory, a fundamental framework that revolutionized understanding of the universe at the subatomic level and became a central pillar for the study of elementary particles.
He completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees in science in China and then moved to the US at the end of World War II. He won a scholarship to the University of Chicago.
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During this period he met Professor Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist known for being the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor. Yang later became a professor at Princeton University.
Throughout his career, Chen Ning Yang was often compared to physics giants such as Albert Einstein, creator of the theory of Relativity, and Enrico Fermi, pioneer in the development of the first nuclear reactor.
His work in statistical mechanics and the principles of symmetry in particle physics cemented his position as one of the greatest names in modern science.