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.
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1957
Chen Ning Yang
