Chinese Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen Ning Yang dies at 103

BEIJING: Chinese Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen Ning Yang, one of the most influential scientists in modern physics, died in Beijing on Saturday. He was 103.

The prestigious Tsinghua University, where he studied and served as a professor, said in a statement that Yang died of an illness, without sharing further details.In his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the time, he said he was as proud of his Chinese heritage as he was devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin.Born in 1922, Yang was brought up surrounded by the Tsinghua campus, where his father was a math professor, the website said. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he obtained his master’s degree from Tsinghua.

He enrolled in the University of Chicago in the United States to pursue a doctorate in 1946 and was strongly influenced by Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, who had won the same Nobel Prize in 1938, the website said. He later became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

“I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict,” according to his speech, shared on the Nobel Prize

“Professor Yang is one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, having made revolutionary contributions to the development of modern physics,” the statement said, praising his contribution to China’s scientific and educational developments.