Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel prize winner, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after an illness, state media outlet Xinhua has reported. Born in eastern China’s Hefei in Anhui province in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics. Yang shared the 1957 Nobel prize for physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died in 2024. They were awarded the prize for work that overthrew the widely accepted “parity laws”…
Tag: Nobel Prizes
Anti-Nobel Sentiment Spawns Alternative Awards Over Time
The choice of a Nobel Peace Prize recipient has often been viewed by autocratic governments as a provocative and hostile act, especially when the winner is a political opponent, an advocate of free expression or an agitator for greater liberties. Some authoritarian countries have even created their own anti-Nobel awards. The best-known recent example is the 2010 establishment of the Confucius Peace Prize in China, named after the venerated Chinese sage of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The prize was part of the angry official reaction to the Nobel…
What Game Theory Says about China’s Strategy
On March 19, 1956, The New York Times carried an interview with Matyas Rakosi, who was described as “Hungary’s ebullient Communist boss.” Rakosi said that his enemies had accused him of using “salami tactics,” that is, cutting away all opposition slice by slice. He didn’t deny it: “That is the job of any good political party — including the Communists,” Rakosi said. Salami-slicing may have originated as a metaphor in Hungary, but in the decades since, it has entered the vocabulary of politicians, military tacticians and editorial writers far from…