YANG, CHEN NING

born Sept. 22, 1922, Hofei, Anhwei, China Chen Ning Yang. byname Frank Yang Chinese-born American theoretical physicist whose research with Tsung-Dao Lee showed that paritythe symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate systemsis violated when certain elementary particles decay. Until this discovery it had been assumed by physicists that parity symmetry is as universal a law as the conservation of energy or electric charge. This and other studies in particle physics earned Yang and Lee the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1957. Additional reading Jeremy Bernstein, A Comprehensible World (1967), is a collection of essays on modern science containing a profile of Lee and Yang first published in The New Yorker magazine; H.A. Boorse and L. Motz (eds.), The World of the Atom, vol. 2 (1966), is a collection of popular and semipopular papers on modern physics containing both biographical sketches of Lee and Yang and some of their popular essays. Yang's Selected Papers 194580 with Commentary (1983) includes personal memories, letters, and recollections of developments in theoretical physics since World War II.