Chen Ning Yang dies at 103, Nobel laureate and YM co-developer

Chen Ning Yang, a Chinese-born physicist whose work helped shape modern particle physics, died in Beijing on Saturday at the age of 103, officials said. An official obituary cited illness as the cause of death.

Yang shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-Dao Lee for their theoretical work on parity laws, a discovery that opened important lines of inquiry into the behavior of elementary particles. In the early 1950s he also co-developed, with American physicist Robert Mills, the Yang-Mills theory, a mathematical framework that became central to the Standard Model of particle physics and to understanding three of nature's four fundamental forces. The Nobel committee said the pair’s investigation led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles.

Born in 1922 in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, Yang was raised on the campus of Tsinghua University, where his father taught mathematics. He received a science degree in 1942 from the National Southwest Associated University and a master’s degree from Tsinghua. After the end of the Sino-Japanese War he traveled to the United States on a fellowship and pursued doctoral work at the University of Chicago, where he...