Yang Chen-Ning, Nobel laureate and supporter of NTU's scientific programmes, dies at 103

Professor Yang Chen-Ning, a Nobel Prizewinning physicist who gave up his US citizenship to become a citizen of China in 2015 and helped persuade other scientists to do the same, has died. He was 103.

- 

Prof Yang died of illness on Oct 18 in Beijing, according to a statement on Tsinghua University's website.

Prof Yang had been a strong supporter of scientific programmes at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU), according to the university's website.

He was appointed external examiner for the Department of Physics at Nanyang University in 1971.

In July 2006, he launched NTU's CN Yang Scholars Programme for undergraduate students with aspirations in fields of science and engineering. Prof Yang also delivered two lectures titled "Symmetry and Physics" and "My Life" for students and faculty at the university.

The Nobel Prize Committee in 1957 recognised Prof Yang and fellow physicist Tsung-Dao Lee, both of whom were born in China and later became naturalised US citizens, for their work on the violation of the parity law in weak interactions. Up until the publication of the pair's paper a year earlier, physicists had long assumed that particles would act the same when mirrored, a theory both of them showed to be misplaced.

Never before had someone of Chinese descent won a Nobel Prize.

"My most important contribution in life is helping change Chinese people's psychology of feeling inferior to others," Prof Yang is quoted as saying on the cover of a 2000 book collecting his writings.

Prof Yang left China for the US in 1946 to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship, earning his doctorate two years later.

Among the faculty who praised Prof Yang at Chicago was Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who recommended him to Dr Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, who was then the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.