Yang Chen-Ning: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Yang Chen-Ning (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng; October 1, 1922 – October 18, 2025) also known as C.N. Yang and Franklin Yang, was a Chinese-American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, particle physics and condensed matter physics.

Yang is known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in 1954 in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory, which describes the nuclear forces in the Standard Model of particle physics.

Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of the weak interaction, which was confirmed by the Wu experiment in 1956. The two proposed that the conservation of parity, a physical law observed to hold in all other physical processes, is violated in weak nuclear reactions – those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles.