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The Law of Parity Conservation and Other Symmetry Laws of Physics

Weak Interactions and Nonconservation of Parity

"for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles"

Chen Ning Yang	Tsung-Dao Lee

1/2 of the prize	1/2 of the prize
China	China
Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, NJ, USA	Columbia University New York, NY, USA
b. 1922	b. 1926

Biography: Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang was born on September 22, 1922, in Hofei, Anwhei, China, the first of five children of Ke Chuan Yang and Meng Hwa Loh Yang. He is also known as Frank or Franklin.

Yang was brought up in the peaceful and academically inclined atmosphere of the campus of Tsinghua University, just outside of Peiping, China, where his father was a Professor of Mathematics. He received his college education at the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, China, and completed his B.Sc. degree there in 1942. His M.Sc. degree was received in 1944 from Tsinghua University, which had moved to Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). He went to the U.S.A. at the end of the war on a Tsinghua University Fellowship, and entered the University of Chicago in January 1946. At Chicago he came under the strong influence of Professor E. Fermi. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1948, Yang served for a year at the University of Chicago as an Instructor. He has been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., since 1949, where he became a Professor in 1955.

Yang has worked on various subjects in physics, but has his chief interest in two fields: statistical mechanics and symmetry principles. His B.Sc. thesis: "Group Theory and Molecular Spectra", written under the guidance of Professor Ta-You Wu, his M.Sc. thesis: "Contributions to the Statistical Theory of Order-Disorder Transformations", written under the guidance of Professor J.S. Wang, and his Ph.D. thesis: "On the Angular Distribution in Nuclear Reactions and Coincidence Measurements", written under the guidance of Professor E. Teller, were instrumental in introducing him to these fields.

Dr. Yang is a prolific author, his numerous articles appearing in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, The Physical Review, Reviews of Modern Physics, and the Chinese Journal of Physics.

Professor Yang has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Academia Sinica, and honoured with the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award (1957). The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the outstanding young men of 1957. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate of the Princeton University, N.J. (1958).

In 1950 Yang married Chih Li Tu and is now the father of three children: Franklin, born 1951; Gilbert, born 1958; and Eulee, born 1961.

Dr. Yang is a quiet, modest, and affable physicist; he met his wife Chih Li Tu while teaching mathematics at her high school in China. He is a hard worker allowing himself very little leisure time.

Biography: Tsung-Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee was born in Shanghai, China, on November 24, 1926, the third of six children of Tsing-Kong Lee and Ming-Chang Chang.

He received most of his high school education in Shanghai. During 1943-1944, he attended the National Chekiang University in Kweichow Province. In 1945, he attended the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, Yunnan Province. Lee's early aptitude for physics was recognized and encouraged by Professor Ta-You Wu. After completing only his sophomore year at Southwest Associated University, Lee received a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in the United States. From 1946-50, Lee studied at the University of Chicago where Enrico Fermi selected Lee to be his doctoral student. In 1950, Lee received his Ph.D. degree on his thesis Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars.

During the years 1950-53, Lee worked as a research associate and lecturer at Yerkes Astronomical Observatory, Wisconsin; at the University of California at Berkeley, and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J.

Lee was then fast becoming a widely known scientist, especially for his work in elementary particles, statistical mechanics, field theory, astrophysics, condensed matter physics and turbulence, having solved several problems of long standing and great complexity. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer praised him as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists then known, whose work was characterized by "a remarkable freshness, versatility, and style".

In 1953, Lee joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor. His first work was on the renormalizable field theory model, better known as the Lee Model. He was successively promoted to Associate Professor in 1955 and Professor in 1956. At age 29, Lee was then the youngest-ever full professor in Columbia University's faculty history. In 1957, when awarded the Nobel Prize at barely 31 years of age, Lee became the second youngest scientist ever to receive this distinction. (The youngest was Sir Lawrence Bragg, who shared the Physics Prize with his father in 1915, at the age of twenty-five).

Lee has published over 300 scientific papers and several books.

Among Lee's many prizes and awards are the Albert Einstein Award in Science, Galileo Galilei Medal, G. Bude Medal, Science for Peace Prize, China National-International Cooperation Award, New York City Science Award, New York Academy of Science Award, Order of Merit Grande Ufficiale from Italy; and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan. He received honorary doctorates, professorships, lectureships and trusteeships from over thirty universities worldwide. Lee is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, Academia Sinica, Academia Nazionale del Lincei, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Nobel Lecture: Chen Ning Yang

The Law of Parity Conservation and Other Symmetry Laws of Physics

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