Tsung-Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao Lee was a Chinese-American theoretical physicist who, at thirty years old, shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Chen-Ning Yang, becoming one of the youngest Nobel laureates in physics history. Working together in 1956, Lee and Yang challenged the assumed universality of parity conservation, proposing that it could be violated in the weak nuclear interaction, a claim experimentally confirmed within months by Chien-Shiung Wu's cobalt-60 experiment. Born in Shanghai in 1926, Lee's education was repeatedly interrupted by the Second World War before he studied under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, earning his doctorate in 1950. He moved to Columbia University in 1953, where at twenty-nine he became the youngest full professor in the university's history, and he remained there for the rest of his career, continuing research into black holes and dark matter after his 2012 retirement. Lee and Yang were the first Chinese-born Nobel laureates in any field. He died at his home in San Francisco on August 4, 2024, at the age of 97.