Tsung-Dao Lee

TD Lee 1957

Tsung-Dao Lee ( Chinese  李政道 , Pinyin Lǐ Zhèngdào ; born November 24, 1926 in Shanghai , Republic of China ) is an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner of Chinese origin.

Life

Tsung-Dao Lee was born on November 24, 1926, the third of six children of businessman Tsing Kong Lee and his wife Ming Chang Chang in Shanghai . He attended Ganzhou Middle School , which he graduated in 1943. He enrolled at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou . However, due to the Japanese invasion, he had to flee to Kunming , where he also met Chen Ning Yang . Considered a very promising student of physics, he received a government scholarship in 1946 that took him to the University of Chicago . After receiving his doctorate on the hydrogen content of white dwarf stars in 1950, he worked for a few months at the Yerkes Astronomical Observatory in Lake Geneva ( Wisconsin ).

From 1950 to 1951 he was a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley , where he went to Princeton and had the opportunity to work with Chen Ning Yang. 1951 to 1953 and again 1957 to 1958 and 1960 to 1962 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1961 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1953 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Columbia University , followed by an appointment as Associate Professor in 1955 and Professor in 1956 at the age of 29, making him the youngest professor on the faculty .

Lee married (Jeannette) Hui Chung Chin in 1950 and has two sons, James (professor of Chinese history at Caltech ) and Stephen.

plant

Lee mainly dealt with statistical mechanics , elementary particle physics and quantum field theory, and initially also with astrophysics . Especially in his close collaboration with Chen Ning Yang with pioneering work on statistical mechanics (especially the Ising model ) and the physics of elementary particles in the 1950s, he quickly achieved great recognition among physicists, and was also recognized by J. Robert Oppenheimer as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of his time. The close collaboration with Yang later broke up and their friendship cooled off.

Lee was in 1957, at the age of 31 years, along with Chen Ning Yang with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering research on the laws of parity which to important discoveries about elementary particles resulted excellent" - he is now by Lawrence Bragg 's second youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Awards

• Nobel Prize in Physics , 1957
• Albert Einstein Memorial Prize, 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).

Fonts (selection)

Individual works

• The evolution of weak interactions . CERN, Geneva 1986.
• Particle physics and introduction to field theory . 4th ed. 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 .

Collective works

• Gerald Feinberg (Ed.): Selected Papers . Birkhäuser, Boston, 3 volumes, 1986, ISBN 0-8176-3344-8 .
• Hai-Cang Ren, Yang Pang (Eds.): TD Lee. Selected Papers (1986-1996) . Gordon and Breach, Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 90-5699-609-6 .

literature

• Gunnar Källén, Wolfgang Pauli: On the mathematical structure of TD Lee's model of a renormalizable field theory . Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1955.
• Robert Novick: Thirty years since parity nonconservation. A Symposium for TD Lee . Birkhäuser, Boston 1988, ISBN 0-8176-3375-8 .

Web links

Commons : Tsung-Dao Lee  - Collection of Images

• Columbia University - Department of Physics (English)
• Columbia University - TD Lee (English)
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1957 award ceremony for Tsung-Dao Lee (English)
• Literature by and about Tsung-Dao Lee in the catalog of the German National Library
• TD Lee. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics