Yang Chen-Ning's father, Ko-Chuen Yang, was a mathematician, and his mother, Meng Hwa Loh Yang, was a housewife.
18 Facts About Yang Chen-Ning
2.
Yang Chen-Ning attended elementary school and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China.
3.
Yang Chen-Ning received a Bachelor of Science in 1942, with his thesis on the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Ta-You Wu.
4.
Yang Chen-Ning continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Zhuxi, working on statistical mechanics.
5.
Yang Chen-Ning was then awarded a scholarship from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, set up by the United States government using part of the money China had been forced to pay following the Boxer Rebellion.
6.
Yang Chen-Ning entered the University of Chicago in January 1946 and studied with Edward Teller.
7.
Yang Chen-Ning remained at the University of Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi.
8.
Yang Chen-Ning was made a permanent member of the Institute in 1952, and full professor in 1955.
9.
Yang Chen-Ning retired from Stony Brook University in 1999, assuming the title Emeritus Professor.
10.
Yang Chen-Ning has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academia Sinica, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society.
11.
Yang Chen-Ning was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States National Academy of Sciences.
12.
Yang Chen-Ning was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by Princeton University, Moscow State University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
13.
Yang Chen-Ning is one of the two Shaw Prize Founding Members and is a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
14.
Yang Chen-Ning married Chih-li Tu, a teacher, in 1950 and has two sons and a daughter with her: Franklin Jr.
15.
Tu died in October 2003, and in December 2004 the then 82-year-old Yang Chen-Ning caused a stir by marrying the then 28-year-old Weng Fan, calling Weng the "final blessing from God".
16.
At the University of Chicago, Yang Chen-Ning first spent twenty months working in an accelerator lab, but he later found he was not as good as an experimentalist and switched back to theory.
17.
Yang Chen-Ning, who has demonstrated on a number of occasions his generosity to physicists beginning their careers, told me about his idea of generalizing gauge invariance and we discussed it at some length.
18.
Yang Chen-Ning has had a great interest in statistical mechanics since his undergraduate time.