Tsung-Dao Lee (
T.D. Lee, ) (born November 24, 1926) is a
ChineseChina is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
-born
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
physicistA physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
, well known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars.
In 1957, Lee, at age 30 or 31, depending on announcement date or ceremony date, with
C. N. YangChen-Ning Franklin Yang is a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He, together with Tsung-dao Lee, received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction...
won the
Nobel Prize in PhysicsThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Nobel Prize in literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
for their work on the violation of parity law in weak interaction, which
Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American physicist with an expertise in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project and disproved the conservation of parity...
experimentally verified.
Lee is the second youngest Nobel laureate, after
W. L. BraggSir William Lawrence Bragg, CH, OBE, MC, FRS was an English physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 with his father Sir William Henry Bragg. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge when the epochal discovery of the structure of DNA was made by James D...
who won the prize at the age of 25, with his father
W. H. BraggSir William Henry Bragg OM, KBE was a British physicist and chemist who uniquely shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his son, William Lawrence Bragg, in 1915.-Early years:...
in 1915.
Tsung-Dao Lee (
T.D. Lee, ) (born November 24, 1926) is a
ChineseChina is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
-born
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
physicistA physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
, well known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars.
In 1957, Lee, at age 30 or 31, depending on announcement date or ceremony date, with
C. N. YangChen-Ning Franklin Yang is a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He, together with Tsung-dao Lee, received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction...
won the
Nobel Prize in PhysicsThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Nobel Prize in literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
for their work on the violation of parity law in weak interaction, which
Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American physicist with an expertise in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project and disproved the conservation of parity...
experimentally verified.
Lee is the second youngest Nobel laureate, after
W. L. BraggSir William Lawrence Bragg, CH, OBE, MC, FRS was an English physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 with his father Sir William Henry Bragg. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge when the epochal discovery of the structure of DNA was made by James D...
who won the prize at the age of 25, with his father
W. H. BraggSir William Henry Bragg OM, KBE was a British physicist and chemist who uniquely shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his son, William Lawrence Bragg, in 1915.-Early years:...
in 1915. Lee and Yang were the first Chinese Laureates. Since
naturalized as American citizenArticle I, section 8, clause 4 of the United States Constitution expressly gives the United States Congress the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. The Immigration and Naturalization Act sets forth the legal requirements for the acquisition of, and divestiture from, citizenship of...
in 1962, Lee thus is also the youngest American who has ever won a Nobel Prize. In Dec 2007, Lee was, again, invited to the Nobel Prize ceremony in
Stockholm' is the capital and largest city of Sweden. It is the site of the national Swedish government, the Riksdag , and the official residence of the Swedish Monarch as well as the prime minister. The Monarch resides at Drottningholm Palace outside of Stockholm since 1980 and uses the Royal Palace of...
by the
Royal Swedish Academy of SciencesThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2 June...
, half a century after winning his Nobel Prize.
Biography
Tsung Dao (T.D. ) Lee's ancestral hometown is
SuzhouSuzhou is a city on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and on the shores of Lake Taihu in the province of Jiangsu, China. The city is renowned for its beautiful stone bridges, pagodas, and meticulously designed gardens which have contributed to its status as a great tourist attraction...
,
Jiangsu' is a province of the People's Republic of China, located along the east coast of the country. The name comes from jiang, short for the city of Jiangning , and su, for the city of Suzhou...
. T.D. was born in
ShanghaiShanghai is the largest city in China, and one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, with over 20 million people. Located on China's central eastern coast at the mouth of the Yangtze River, the city is administered as a municipality of the People's Republic of China with province-level...
,
ChinaChina is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
. Lee's father was a chemical industrialist who was involved in China's early development of fertilizer. Lee received his
secondarySecondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of compulsory schooling, known as secondary education, takes place. It follows on from elementary or primary education....
education in Shanghai.
Due to the
Second Sino-Japanese warThe Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany and the Soviet Union...
, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he didn't obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly applied and was admitted by
Zhejiang UniversityZhejiang University , sometimes referred to as Zheda, is a national university in China. Founded in 1897, Zhejiang University is one of China's oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher education....
. Initially, Lee registered as a student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Very quickly, Lee's talent was discovered and his interest in physics grew rapidly. Several physics professors, including Shu Xingbei and
Kan-Chang WangWang Ganchang was a nuclear physicist from China. He was one of the initiators of China's researches in nuclear physics, cosmic rays and particle physics...
, largely guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics of Zhejiang University. During 1943–1944, Lee studied at Zhejiang University.
However, again disrupted by further Japanese invasion, Lee continued at the
National Southwestern Associated UniversityWhen the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out between China and Japan in 1937, Tsinghua University, Peking University and Nankai University, merged to form Changsha Temporary University in Changsha, and later National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming...
(國立西南聯合大學) in
KunmingKunming is a prefecture-level city and capital of Yunnan province, in southwestern China. Because of its year-round temperate climate, Kunming is often called the "Spring City" or "City of Eternal Spring" ....
the next year in 1945, where he studied with Professor
Ta-You WuTa-You Wu was a Chinese-born atomic and nuclear theoretical physicist who worked in the United States, Canada, mainland China, and Taiwan. He has been called the "Father of Chinese Physics."...
. Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in USA. In 1946, Lee went to the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D...
and was selected by Professor
Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi was an Italian physicist most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics...
to become his PhD student. Lee completed his PhD thesis under Fermi in 1950.
In 1953, Lee joined
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, where he remains today. His first work at Columbia was on a solvable model of quantum field theory better known as the Lee Model. Soon, his focus turned to particle physics and the developing puzzle of K meson decays. Lee realized in early 1956 that the key to the puzzle was parity non-conservation. At Lee's suggestion, the first experimental test was on hyperion decay by the Steinberger group. At that time, the experimental result gave only an indication of a 2 standard deviation effect of possible parity violation. Encouraged by this feasibility study, Lee made a systematic study of possible P,T,C and CP violations in weak interactions with collaborators, including C.N. Yang. After the definitive experimental confirmation by C.S. Wu and her collaborators of parity non-conservation, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics.
In the early 1960s, Lee and collaborators initiated the important field of high energy neutrino physics. In 1964, Lee, with M. Nauenberg, analyzed the divergences connected with particles of zero rest mass, and described a general method known as the KLN theorem for dealing with these divergences, which still plays an important role in contemporary work in QCD, with its massless, self-interacting gluons. In 1974–75, Lee published several papers on "A New Form of Matter in High Density", which led to the modern field of RHIC physics, now dominating the entire high energy nuclear physics field.
Besides particle physics, Lee has been active in statistical mechanics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, lattice QCD. In 1983, Lee wrote a paper entitled, "Can Time Be a Discrete Dynamical Variable?"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations. Beginning in 1975, Lee and collaborators established the field of non-topological solitons, which led to his work on soliton stars and black holes throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Since 1997, Lee directed the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, which together with his Columbia group, completed in 1998 a 1 teraflops supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD. At present, a 10 teraflops QCDOC machine is under construction to be completed in 2004. Most recently, Lee and R. Friedberg have developed a new method to solve the Schroedinger Equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other instanton problems.
Educational activities
Soon after the re-establishment of China-American
relations with the PRCSino-American or U.S.-China relations refers to international relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China . Most analysts have characterized present Sino-American relations as complex and multi-faceted, with the United States and the People's Republic of China...
, Lee and his wife, Hui-Chun Jeannette Chin , were able to go to China, where Lee gave a series of lectures and seminars, and organized the
CUSPEACUSPEA was an examination and admission system used by the physics departments of some American and Canadian universities for graduate school admission from People's Republic of China between 1979 and 1989....
(China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application).
In 1998, Lee established the Chun-Tsung Endowment (秦惠莙—李政道中国大学生见习基金) in memory of his wife, Hui-Chun Chin, who died 3 years earlier. The Chun-Tsung scholarships, supervised by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (New York), are awarded to undergraduates, usually in their 2nd or 3rd year, at five universities, which are Fudan University, Lanzhou university, Suzhou University, Peking University and Taiwan National Tsing Hua University. Students selected for such scholarships are named "Chun-Tsung Scholars" (莙政学者).
Personal life
Chin and Lee were married in 1950 and have two sons:
James and
StephenStephen Lee is a chemist who won a MacArthur Award in 1994. He is the son of Tsung-Dao Lee, the winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957. Stephen Lee is currently a professor at Cornell University.-External links:*...
. Lee reads
whodunitA whodunit or whodunnit is a complex, plot-driven variety of the detective story in which the puzzle is the main feature of interest. The reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed in the final pages of the...
novels when he does not work on physics. His English given name differs dramatically from the Chinese Romanization systems in use at the time of his childhood,
Wade-GilesWade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization system for the Mandarin language used in Beijing. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles' was the main...
and
Gwoyeu RomatzyhGwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...
. Tsung-Dao Lee's publications are all under the name of T.D. Lee.
Honours and awards
Awards:
- Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Nobel Prize in literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
(1957)
- Albert Einstein Award
The Albert Einstein Award is an award in theoretical physics, that was established to recognize high achievement in the natural sciences. It was endowed by the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund in honor of Albert Einstein's 70th birthday...
(1957)
- G. Bude Medal, Collège de France (1969, 1977)
- Galileo Galilei Medal (1979)
- Order of Merit, Grande Ufficiale, Italy (1986)
- Science for Peace Prize (1994)
- China National-International Cooperation Award (1995)
- Naming of Small Planet 3443 as the 3443 Leetsungdao
- External links :*...
(1997)
- New York City Science Award (1997)
- Pope Joannes Paulus Medal (1999)
- Ministero dell'Interno Medal of the Government of Italy (1999)
- New York Academy of Science Award (2000)
- The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star
The Order of the Rising Sun is a Japanese order, established in 1875 by Emperor Meiji of Japan...
, Japan (2007)
Memberships:
- National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code....
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
- American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society is a discussion group founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin as an offshoot of his earlier club, the Junto...
- Academia Sinica
The Academia Sinica , headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the national academy of the Republic of China...
- Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
The Chinese Academy of Sciences , formerly known as Academia Sinica , is the national academy for the natural sciences of the People's Republic of China. It is an institution of the State Council of China...
- Third World Academy of Sciences
TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world -- until 2004 named Third World Academy of Sciences -- is a merit-based science academy uniting more than 800 scientists from some 90 countries. Its principal aim is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable development in...
- Pontifical Academy of Sciences
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is a scientific academy of the Vatican City, was founded in 1936 by Pope Pius XI. It is placed under the protection of the reigning Supreme Pontiff . Its aim is to promote the progress of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences and the study of related...
External links