Tsung-Dao Lee
Tsung- Dao Lee (李政道; * November 24, 1926 in Shanghai, China) is a Chinese physicist and Nobel laureate who has taken the U.S. citizenship.
Life
Tsung- Dao Lee was born on 24 November 1926 as the third of six children of businessman Kong Tsing Lee and his wife Ming Chang Chang in Shanghai. He attended secondary school in Ganzhou, from which he graduated in 1943. He enrolled at the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. However, he was forced to flee due to the Japanese invasion to Kunming, where he also met Chen Ning Yang. Since he was considered to be very promising student of physics, he was awarded a government scholarship in 1946, which led him to the University of Chicago. After his doctorate on the hydrogen content of white dwarf stars in 1950 he worked for several months at Yerkes Astronomical Observatory in Lake Geneva (Wisconsin ).
He was from 1950 to 1951 lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, he went to Princeton, where he had the opportunity to work together with Chen Ning Yang. 1951 to 1953 and again from 1957 to 1958 and 1960 to 1962 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1953 he was appointed assistant professor of physics at Columbia University appointed, the 1955 appointment as associate professor, and in 1956 at the age of 29 years followed the professor - he was the youngest professor at the Faculty.
Lee married in 1950 ( Jeannette ) Hui Chung Chin and the couple have two sons, James ( Professor of Chinese History at Caltech ) and Stephen.
Work
Lee dealt mainly with statistical mechanics, elementary particle physics and quantum field theory, and beginning with astrophysics. Especially in its close cooperation with Chen Ning Yang with pioneering work on statistical mechanics ( specifically the Ising model ) and the physics of elementary particles in the 1950s, he quickly reached great recognition among physicists, he was also of J. Robert Oppenheimer as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of his time praised. The close collaboration with Yang broke up later, and their friendship cooled off.
Lee in 1957, awarded at the age of 31 years, along with Chen Ning Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics " for pioneering research on the laws of parity, which led to important discoveries about elementary particles " - he is so to Lawrence Bragg is the second youngest ever winner the physics Nobel Prize.
Awards
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 1957
- Albert Einstein Memorial Award, 1957
- Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1959
- Member of the National Academy of Sciences 1964
- Member of the American Philosophical Society 1962
He has twelve honorary doctorates (until 2006).
Writings (selection )
- The evolution of weak interactions. CERN, Geneva, 1986.
- Particle physics and introduction to field theory. 4th Edition, Harwood Academic Publ Chur 1990, ISBN 3-7186-0032-3.
- Symmetries, Asymmetries and the World of Physics. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1988, ISBN 0-295-96519-3.
- Gerald Feinberg (eds.): Selected Papers. Birkhäuser, Boston, 3 volumes, 1986, ISBN 0-8176-3344-8.
- Hai - Cang Ren, Yang Pang (eds.): T. D. Lee. Selected Papers ( 1986-1996 ). Gordon and Breach, Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 90-5699-609-6.