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Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.

To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."

In order to explain his impact to people, someone could find a friendlier name for "gauge"?

Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*)

https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s

Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678

> friendlier name for "gauge"?

Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?

It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!

Sorry: gauge-field.

It's poetic and you can pardon the french but the combination is alien.

Poetry is hard: a poetic way to say "co-ordinate transformation" or "tensors" could help students to calculate with them. I'd suggest "shear-squeezing-your-xray-lens" for everything but I fear the backlash from teachers because that would take a doctorate (or more) to unpack!

The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot

How do you know he's underrated?

I came to know of this guy though Jim Simons.

He once "leaked" the idea that Jim Simon's trading success came from his use of ideas called "gauge theory" and "fibre bundles".

I forgot the exact timestamp, but you will have to watch the entire interview to find that segment — https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo

Simons himself completely disspells this idea in his interview on Numberphile.

AFAIK, one of the early hires at RenTech was Leonard Baum, famous for the Baum–Welch Algorithm.

RenTech is quite secretive, but this supports the rumors that simple graphical models for time series were behind some of their trading strategies.

It's a trivial statement since many equities are correlated on a multidimensional manifold of characteristics. Jim Simons was just early and now rentech is nothing special.

Rentec is still world renowned after pioneering the quant business 40+ years ago. I don't think the rested on their laurels with some easy thing that they just stumbled on early

This reads like “Newton or Einstein were just early”. That’s the whole thing, being the first person to do it.

One of the Feynman lectures in physics is about Yang, Lee, and Wu's discovery. I thought it was a great listen:

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html

#52 Symmetry in physical laws

Why didn't they mention them in the lecture notes?

I am a former physics student of C. N. Yang’s at Stony Brook University.

Rest In Peace.

Of Yang-Mills fame among many other things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning

RIP

I'd love to one day learn enough math and physics to really understand gauge theory beyond just the many pop-sci videos I've watched about it.

Sad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.

Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory

>Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.

What did he have to say?

It was a long time ago but I remember Fermi decided that he (Yang) didn't do well at experimental physics, saying "where there's a Yang, there's a bang". My impression was that the atomic bomb wasn't a surprise, with the idea that when the ship arrived he'd enter a new world as a result. He was Oppenheimer's assistant at Princeton. I don't think I knew that at the time, so he must have told me but I don't recall any details. We also had a discussion about Maxwell but his later article on the subject is a much better source than my fading memory.

(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow

A life well lived.

RIP.

China only have 8 Nobel winners compared to the 425 from the US is crazy.

9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...).

But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded by Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain (largely India), France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan again, and had a civil war which hasn't technically ended (plus the end of the Boxer Rebellion), a revolution, and the worst famine in human history. But probably the worst event for its Nobel chances was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships, including in the so-called Republic of China.

The US has been invaded zero times and had zero civil wars during that period, and in the US, the Cultural Revolution and dictatorship are just starting. Consequently many people who might have been Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, etc., during the period in question were instead born in the US. And note that, on the page I linked above, 6 Nobel laureates from the US were actually born in China: Charles K. Kao, Daniel C. Tsui, Edmond H. Fischer, Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Walter H. Brattain (!).

> 9 if you count people...

13 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_Nobel_laureate..., including peace prize laureates Liu Xiaobo (2010) and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989).

> But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded...

> The US has been invaded zero times...

The number of external invasions is not a strong indicator of the number of Nobel Prizes, if you compare all countries, beyond just China or the US.

And as you mentioned, the Cultural Revolution greatly reduces the chance of Chinese Nobel, so internal events can take a large role. And Mao led to more deaths—not to mention destruction to science and culture—than external invasions in the last century combined.

> The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships...

The dictatorship arguably hasn't ended, by taking another less brutal form. And to be precise, CCP brought the civil wars and its consequences, not the civil wars brought dictatorships.

Mao killed less than Taiping Rebellion, which had 100M per some study. Mao is probably half of that ,still more than world war 1 and 2 combined.

Yes, but that was 50 years before the Nobel Prizes were established.

> China has been invaded by ... Britain (largely India)

That is such an interesting characterization of the territorial disputes between PRC(and/or ROC) and RoI.

This was 40 years before the Republic of India was formed.

The War of 1812... when the British burned down the White House and the Capitol surely has to count as an "invasion".

That was before Nobel prize was established.

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It seems that you didn't understand the comment you were replying to, indeed having gone to great lengths to misinterpret it.

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No, you wrote that comment. The comment you misinterpreted did not say any of those things.

Maybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.

I’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.

Yang got out before Mao. China managed to birth and educate several world-class mathematicians and scientists in the short span between the beginning of Westernized education and Mao's take over... and then it stopped for several decades. The lucky ones managed to get out.

Strange to think that revolutions, unrest, the Sino-Japanese war, and the civil war all provided better conditions for fostering top talent than Mao's China did.

India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like China or the soviet union had.

I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up.

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The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented.

Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world.

The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think.

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There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one.

The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals.

This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers.

The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.

> the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were

Also for killing tens of millions of people, which not only is murder of each person but also those millions of people - and then their families - never benefit.

Absolutely, I am in no way saying Mao era methods were justified, warranted or even effective.

They were misguided, ineffective, and directly or indirectly killed people in the millions.

I am just pointing out that, the atrocities of the era doesn't justify seeing pre 1960s or pre1950s years of China with rose tinted glasses as a better era, it wasn't unless you were in the elite.

It would be no different than seeing the 1970s or any earlier generation in U.S. history as a better era. Only a very small in-group perhaps had it good. Everyone else be it black, women, indigenous, various immigrants, religious, neuro or sexually diverse have only seen net improvements in last 300 years.

Another point about Soviet scientists: it was very often a career-ending move to accept a Nobel prize unless you were a truly untouchable cult of personality and/or direct friend of those in power. See Andrey Sakharov, who first invented the soviet hydrogen bomb and later dedicated himself to non-proliferation which earned him a Nobel Peace prize. He was however barred from traveling to Oslo to accept in 1975, having already been blacklisted from classified work since 1968.

I wonder to what extent that lead to the curbing of consideration of those behind the iron curtain.

If you're familiar with the history of China since the Nobel prize started in 1901 it's not surprising. Five of those eight did their work outside China too.

~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.

It's also quite interesting to compare to the Soviet Union, which managed around 30 Nobel laureates in spite of also going through a communist revolution and some genocides like China did.