Chinese Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen-ning Yang dies aged 103
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Chen-ning Yang died in Beijing on Saturday, weeks after marking his 103rd birthday. Yang died of illness, according to state news agency Xinhua. No details were given. He was often ranked alongside Albert Einstein as one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists. In 1954, Yang co-authored a set of equations with…
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Chen-ning Yang died in Beijing on Saturday, weeks after marking his 103rd birthday.
Yang died of illness, according to state news agency Xinhua. No details were given.
He was often ranked alongside Albert Einstein as one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists.
In 1954, Yang co-authored a set of equations with the American physicist Robert Mills that turned out to be as important to physics as Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The resulting Yang–Mills theory described how three of nature’s four fundamental forces – the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions – operate in the subatomic world.
It laid the mathematical foundation for what later became known as the Standard Model, the cornerstone of modern physics that unifies these forces and explains the behaviour of all known elementary particles.
