Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen Ning Yang dies at 103, says Chinas state media

Noted Chinese physicist and Nobel Laureate Chen-ning Yang, died in Beijing on Saturday (October 18, 2025). He was 103 years previous.

Yang was born in Hefei, east China’s Anhui Province, in 1922. In the Nineteen Forties, he went to the United States to pursue educational research and subsequently held educating positions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, official media in Beijing reported.

In 1954, he co-authored a set of equations with the American physicist Robert Mills that turned out to be as necessary to physics as Einstein’s concept of relativity.

The ensuing Yang–Mills concept described how three of nature’s 4 elementary forces – the electromagnetic, weak and powerful interactions – function within the subatomic world, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

Their concept laid the mathematical basis for what later turned often known as the Standard Model, the cornerstone of contemporary physics that unifies these forces and explains the behaviour of all recognized elementary particles.

“Yang was one of many best theoretical physicists of the twentieth century,” Ms. Shi Yu, professor of physics and affiliate director of the Wilczek Quantum Centre on the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies mentioned.

Without Yang-Mills concept, there could be no Standard Model, she informed the Post.

Yang’s most profound contribution was altering the mindset of Chinese individuals who as soon as believed they had been inferior to others in science and galvanizing future generations to imagine they might stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s greatest scientists, she mentioned.