Date: Nov 26th, 2006
Author: CAS News
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CAS held an 80th birthday party for Prof. Tsung-Dao Lee, a world-renowned scientist and 1957 Nobel Laureate in Physics, on Nov. 21 in Beijing.
On behalf of the Academy and its Presidium, CAS President LU Yongxiang extended heartfelt congratulations to Lee at the party, and expressed deep appreciation for his outstanding contributions to the development of China's scientific research and high-level education.
Also present at the meeting were CAS members YE Minghan and FANG Shouxian from the Institute of High Energy Physics as well as OUYANG Zhongcan from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, CAS.
T. D. Lee, born on Nov. 24, 1926 in Shanghai, China, is now University Professor at Columbia University, U.S. After graduation from Chicago Univeristy as a Ph.D. at the age of 26, Lee has been a diligent researcher in diverse fields of modern physics such as quantum field theory, elementary particle theory, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics and astrophysics. Among his numerous breakthroughs, the most monumental one was the discovery of parity non-conservation in weak interactions co-working with C. N. Yang, which won them Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1957.
Lee was not only a pioneering scientist but also a patriot who contributes a lot to the scientific development of his motherland, including scholar visits to the mainland and lectures to thousands of university students. Under his initiative, the post-doc system and National Post-Doc Foundation were established in China for the first time. Several dozen Chinese scholars were arranged by him to go abroad for advanced studies in high energy physics, who later became the backbone scientists for building the Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC). Lee even donated his personal savings to establish the Hui-Chun Chin and Tsung-Dao Lee Chinese Undergraduate Research Endowment (CURE), providing more research opportunities to qualified undergraduates from certain universities across China.
