Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and renowned physicist Yang Zhenning passed away at noon on the 18th in Beijing, at the age of 103.
Yang Zhenning was born in 1922 in Hefei, Anhui. In the 1940s, he went to the United States for further study and teaching. In 1957, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
In the more than 20 years since returning to China, Yang Zhenning has taught at Tsinghua University, where he made significant contributions in talent cultivation and recruitment as well as in promoting academic exchanges between China and abroad.
According to Tsinghua News Network, Mr. Yang Zhenning is one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and has made outstanding contributions to the development of modern physics. The "Yang-Mills gauge theory" he proposed with Mills laid the foundation for the later Standard Model of particle physics and is considered one of the cornerstones of modern physics, comparable to Maxwell's equations and Einstein's general theory of relativity as one of the most important fundamental physical theories.
He and Lee Tsung-Dao collaborated to propose the revolutionary idea of parity non-conservation in weak interactions, and together they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, becoming the first Chinese to win the Nobel Prize.