Chen Ning Yang, a world-renowned scientist and Nobel Prize winner in physics, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media.
In a report by state broadcaster CCTV, his death was solely attributed to “illness.”
He was born in Hefei, the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, and traveled to the United States in the 1940s to pursue higher education.
He later had several teaching positions in the country and obtained US citizenship, which he apparently gave up in 2015.
He and his colleague Tsung-Dao Lee shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for breaking the principle of conservation of parity, which was a fundamental law of nuclear physics.
He is also credited with developing the Yang-Mills theory, a mathematical framework for understanding how force-carrying particles interact, in collaboration with US physicist Robert Mills in the early 1950s.
Yang eventually taught at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, where he “significantly contributed to cultivating and recruiting talent and promoting international academic exchanges,” according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Yang’s first wife, Chih Li Tu, died in 2003, and the following December, the then-82-year-old married doctoral student Weng Fan, who was 28 at the time.
