"Professor Yang is, after Eintein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics."
Freeman Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton)
"Chen Ning Yang's contributions to physics are unsurpassed in the latter
half of the Twentieth Century in their scope and depth. The story of his
analysis of parity nonconversation in the weak interactions with T.D.
Lee is the stuff of scientific legend: their deceiphering of then
puzzling features of particle decay, the publication of their solution,
and the thunderbolt of its confirmation leading to the Nobel Prize just
a year later. This brought them to the world state as the first Chinese
to win that award.
Yang's development with R.L. Mills of the concept of non-abelian gauge
invariance and of the class of Yang-Mills theories was another such
landmark event. In this case, it took two decades for the concepts that
they introduced to flower into the contemporary Standard Model of
elementary particle physics. Even beyond the successes of the Standard
Model, however, the work of Yang and Mills set physics on a road that it
still travels today."
G. Sterman
Director, CN Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics (Stony Brook)
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Thematic Melodies of Twentieth Century Theoretical
