Current topics in physics: Proceedings of the Inauguration Conference of the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics : Seoul National University, Korea, 4-10 June 1996
Documents the first major international event by the Center, which was recently founded with the participation of ten member countries and regions, to midwife the Asian Pacific region into the mainstream of development in the international scientific community. Some 120 papers cover condensed matter physics, statistical physics, atomic and optical physics, field theory, gravitation and cosmology, mathematical and general physics, high-energy phenomenology, nuclear physics, plasma physics, Bose- Einstein condensation, and a variety of topics in the plenary session. They are reproduced from typescripts, some double spaced, and include some abstracts. The two volumes are paged consecutively No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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