Yang, Chen Ning 1922-
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Hofei, China, he was educated in Kuming, before gaining a scholarship to Chicago University in 1945 to work under Edward Teller. He became professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton (1955-65), and from 1965 was director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at New York State University, Stony Brook. In 1956 with Tsung-Dao Lee he concluded that the quantum property known as parity was unlikely to be conserved in weak interactions, confirmed later that year by a group of physicists headed by Chien-Shiung Wu. For this prediction, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for physics, and the Einstein Commemorative Award from Yeshiva University in the same year. Yang was later awarded the 1986 National Medal of Science.