Conference in Honor of
CN Yang's 85th Birthday
Statistical physics, high energy, condensed matter & mathematical physics
Swissotel Merchant Court
31 October – 3 November 2007, Singapore
Professor Yang Chen Ning was born on September 22, 1922, in Hefei. He was brought up in the peaceful and academically inclined atmosphere of the campus of Tsinghua University, just outside of Beiping, 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. In 1965 he was appointed Einstein Professor of Physics and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Academia Sinica, and was honoured with the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award (1957). He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University (1958).
In 1957, at the age of 35, Yang Chen Ning and Lee Tsung-Dao received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory that the law of conservation of parity (mirror-reflection) does not apply to the weak force interactions between elementary particles. Their startling prediction was quickly confirmed experimentally, by Chien-Shiung Wu. Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing a gauge theory of a new class. Such "Yang-Mills theories" are now a fundamental part of the Standard Model of particle physics.
