Selected Papers of Chen Ning Yang II - With Commentaries by Yang, Chen Ning (2013) Paperback

by Chen Ning Yang

Professor Chen Ning Yang, an eminent contemporary physicist, was Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1955 to 1966, and Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook until his retirement in 1999. He has been Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1986 and Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, since 1998.Since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948, Prof Yang has made great impacts in both abstract theory and phenomenological analysis in modern physics. In 1983, he published "Selected Papers (1945-1980), With Commentary". It has been considered by Freeman Dyson as one of his favorite books. The present book is a sequel to that earlier volume. It is a collection of his personally selected papers (1971-2012) supplemented by his insightful commentaries. Its contents reflect Professor Yang's changing interests after he reached age sixty. It also includes commentaries written by him in 2011 when he is 89 years old.The papers and commentaries in this unique collection comprise a remarkable personal and professional chronicle, shedding light on both the intellectual development of a great physicist and on the nature of scientific inquiry.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Chen Ning Yang, byname Frank Yang is a Chinese theoretical physicist whose research with Tsung-Dao Lee showed that parity—the symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate systems—is violated when certain elementary particles decay. Until this discovery it had been assumed by physicists that parity symmetry is as universal a law as the conservation of energy or electric charge.

In the year 1957, Yang was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with Tsung-Dao Lee "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles".

Yang’s father, Yang Ko-chuen (also known as Yang Wu-chih), was a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University, near Peking. While still young, Yang read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and adopted “Franklin” as his first name. After graduation from the Southwest Associated University, in K’unming, he took his B.Sc. in 1942 and his M.S. in 1944. On a fellowship, he studied in the United States, enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1946. He took his Ph.D. in nuclear physics with Edward Teller and then remained in Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi, the physicist who was probably the most influential in Yang’s scientific development. Lee had also come to Chicago on a fellowship, and the two men began the collaboration that led eventually to their Nobel Prize work on parity. In 1949 Yang went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and became a professor there in 1955. He became a U.S. citizen in 1964.

Yang is known for, amoung other things:
Landau–Yang theorem
Parity violation
Yang–Mills theory
Yang–Baxter equation
Byers-Yang theorem