Name: Yang Zhenning

Gender: Male

Date of birth: October 1, 1922

Birthplace: Hefei, Anhui

Education: Postdoctoral fellow

Zhenning Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui Province on October 1, 1922 (later his date of birth was mistakenly written as September 22, 1922 on his overseas passport in 1945). He was less than one year old when his father Yang Wuzhi was admitted to study in the United States at public expense and went abroad. When he was 4 years old, his mother began to teach him how to read square characters, and she taught him 3,000 characters in more than a year. When Yang Zhenning was 60 years old, he recalled: "The total number of words I recognize now is estimated to be no more than twice that number."

When Yang Zhenning was 6 years old in 1928, his father came back from the United States and met him. Just ask him if he has ever studied. He said he had read it. What books have you studied? I have read "Longwen Whip Shadow". Ask him to memorize it, and he will memorize it all. Yang Zhenning recalled: "My father then asked me what the book meant, and I couldn't explain it at all. However, I remember that he still gave me a pen as a reward, which was something I had never seen before."

When Yang Zhenning was in elementary school, his scores in mathematics and Chinese were very good. Before graduating from middle school, he was admitted to Southwest Associated University. That was in 1938, when he was only 16 years old. In 1942, 20-year-old Yang Zhenning graduated from university and immediately entered the graduate school of Southwest Associated University. Two years later, he obtained a master's degree with honors and was admitted to a publicly funded student program in the United States. In 1945, he went to the United States to study at the University of Chicago, and received his doctorate in 1948.

In 1949, Chen Ning Yang entered the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow and began to collaborate with Tsung-Dao Lee on particle physics research. During this period, he encountered many puzzling phenomena and unsolvable problems. They boldly doubted and carefully verified, and finally overturned the law of parity conservation, making the confusion disappear and the problem solved. Chen Ning Yang said this in his 1957 Nobel lecture: "At that time, physicists found that the situation they were in was like a person groping for a way out of a dark room. He knew that in a certain direction, there must be a person The door that can get him out of trouble. But in which direction? "It turns out that the law of parity conservation does not apply to weak interactions. "

Chenning Yang's contributions to physics are wide-ranging, including particle physics, statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. In addition to discovering parity non-conservation with Li Zhengdao, Chenning Yang also took the lead in cooperating with Mill R.L. Mills proposed the "Yang-Mills gauge field" and created the "Yang-Baxer equation" with R. Baxter, the American physicist and Nobel Prize winner E. .Segre) praised Yang Zhenning as "one of the three theoretical physicists in the world who can be regarded as all-around in decades"

Yang Zhenning remembers the legacy of his father Yang Wuzhi: "You should remember your country when you are alive." Enlong". In the summer of 1971, he was the first American scientist to visit China. He said: "As an American scientist of Chinese origin, I have the responsibility to help these two countries with which I share a common bond to build a network of understanding and peace. The bridge of friendship. I also feel that I should contribute some strength to the development of China's science and technology. "

This is what Yang Zhenning said and what he did. For more than 20 years, he has traveled frequently between China and the United States and done a lot of fruitful academic contact work. He wrote two poems like this: " The clouds, water, wind and thunder are changing rapidly, and things are competing with each other day and night.

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