Tsung-Dao Lee is a Chinese-born American physicist, known for his work on parity
violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics,
nontopological solitons and soliton stars. He holds the rank of University
Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since
1953 and from which he retired in 2012. In 1957, Lee, at the age of 30, won the
Nobel Prize in Physics with C. N. Yang for their work on the violation of the
parity law in weak interactions, which Chien-Shiung Wu experimentally verified.
Lee was the youngest Nobel laureate after World War II until Malala
Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He is the fourth youngest
Nobel laureate in history after W. L. Bragg, Werner Heisenberg and Malala
Yousafzai. Lee and Yang were the first Chinese laureates. Since he became a
naturalized American citizen in 1962, Lee is also the youngest American ever
to have won a Nobel Prize. Biography
= Family = Tsung Dao Lee's ancestral hometown is
Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. T. D. was born in Shanghai.
Lee's father Chun-kang Lee, one of the first graduates of the University of
Nanking, was a chemical industrialist and merchant who was involved in China's
early development of modern synthesized fertilizer. Lee's grandfather Chong-tan
Lee was the first Chinese Methodist Episcopal senior pastor of St. John's
Church in Suzhou. Lee has four brothers and one sister.
Educator Robert C.T. Lee is one of T. D.'s brothers. Lee's mother Chang and
brother Robert C. T. moved to Taiwan in the 1950s. They were accidentally jailed
in Taiwan during the White Terror. = Early life =
Lee received his secondary education in Shanghai, Suzhou and Jiangxi. Due to the
Second Sino-Japanese war, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus
he did not obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly
applied and was admitted by the National Che Kiang University. 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 Wang, largely
guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics of National
Che Kiang University, where he studied in 1943–1944.
However, again disrupted by a further Japanese invasion, Lee continued at the
National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming the next year in
1945, where he studied with Professor Ta-You Wu.
= Life and research in USA = Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese
government fellowship for graduate study in USA. In 1946, Lee went to the
University of Chicago and was selected by Professor Enrico Fermi to become his
PhD student. Lee completed his PhD thesis under Fermi in 1950. Lee served
as research associate and lecturer in physics at the University of California
at Berkeley from 1950 to 1951. In 1953, Lee joined Columbia University,
where he remained until retirement. 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.
From 1997 to 2003 Lee was director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, which
together with other researchers from Columbia, completed a 1 teraflops
supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD in 1998 and a 10 teraflops QCDOC machine in
2001. Most recently, Lee and R. Friedberg have developed a new method to
solve the Schrödinger Equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for
the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other
instanton problems. They have also done work on the neutrino mapping matrix.
Educational activities Soon after the re-establishment of
China-American relations with the PRC, 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 CUSPEA. In 1998, Lee established the Chun-Tsung
Endowment 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, are awarded to undergraduates, usually in their 2nd or
3rd year, at five universities, which are Fudan University, Lanzhou
University, Soochow University, Peking University and Taiwan National Tsing Hua
University. Students selected for such scholarships are named "Chun-Tsung
Scholars". Personal life
Chin and Lee were married in 1950 and have two sons: James and Stephen. Lee
reads whodunit novels when not working on physics. The English spelling of his
given name, "Lee", differs dramatically from the Chinese Romanization systems in
use at the time of his childhood, Wade-Giles and Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
Tsung-Dao Lee's publications are all under the name of T.D. Lee.
Honours and awards Awards:
Nobel Prize in Physics G. Bude Medal, Collège de France
Galileo Galilei Medal Order of Merit, Grande Ufficiale, Italy
Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture and Medal Science for Peace Prize
China National-International Cooperation Award
Matteucci Medal Naming of Small Planet 3443 as the 3443
Leetsungdao New York City Science Award
Pope Joannes Paulus Medal Ministero dell'Interno Medal of the
Government of Italy New York Academy of Science Award
The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, Japan
Memberships: National Academy of Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences American Philosophical Society
Academia Sinica Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
Chinese Academy of Sciences Third World Academy of Sciences
Pontifical Academy of Sciences Bibliography
Technical Reports: "Conservation Laws in Weak
Interactions," Columbia University, United States Department of Energy,.
"Weak Interactions," Columbia University, United States Department of
Energy,. (with C.N. Yang) "Elementary Particles
and Weak Interactions," Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States
Department of Energy,. "History of Weak Interactions," Columbia
University, United States Department of Energy, July 1970).
"Energy Electromagnetic and Weak Interaction Processes," Brookhaven
National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy, January 11, 1972).
Books: Lee, T.D.. Particle Physics and
Introduction to Field Theory. Newark: Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN
3-7186-0032-3. Lee, T.D.; Feinberg, G.. Selected
Papers, Vols 13. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN
0-8176-3344-8. Lee, T.D.. Ed. R. Novick: Thirty Year's
Since Parity Nonconservation. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN
0-8176-3375-8. Lee, T.D.. Symmetries, Asymmetries, and
the World of Particles. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN
0-295-96519-3. Lee, T.D.; Ren, H. C.; Pang, Y..
Selected Papers, 1985-1996. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. ISBN 90-5699-609-6.
Lee, T.D.. Science and Art. Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technical
Publisher. ISBN 7-5323-5609-4. Lee, T.D.. The Challenge from Physics.
Beijing: China Economics Publisher. ISBN 7-5017-5622-8.
Lee, T.D.; Cheng, Ji; Huaizu, Liu; Li, Teng. Response to the Dispute of
Discovery of Parity Violation. Lanzhou, Gansu: Gansu Science and Technology
Publishing House. ISBN 7-5424-0929-8. See also
Lee–Yang theorem Zhejiang Institute of Modern Physics
Chinese Americans in New York City References
External links T.D. Lee's English Home Page
Tsung Dao(T.D.) Lee Archives Online T.D. Lee's Home Page at Columbia
University Nobel bio
Brookhaven National Laboratory: Tsung-Dao Lee Appointed as Member of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences Celebration of T.D. Lee's 80th Birthday
and the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of Parity Non-conservation
Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and
Technical Information, United States Department of Energy