Tsung-Dao Lee

He was born on November 24, 1926, in Shanghai, China, to Tsing-Kong Lee and Ming-Chang Chang as the third child among five sons and one daughter. His father, one of the first graduates of ‘University of Nanking’, was by profession a merchant and chemical industrialist.

He attended secondary schools in Shanghai, Suzhou and Jiangxi. His high school education was interrupted because of Second Sino-Japanese war, which prevented him to earn secondary diploma.

However he directly applied to ‘National Che Kiang University’ (presently ‘Zhejiang University’) in 1943 and was granted admission. Although initially he enrolled in the Chemical Engineering department, he gradually took interest in physics. Guided by physics professors like Kan-Chang Wang and Shu Xingbei, he took transfer to the Physics department.

His studies were again interrupted due to further Japanese invasion. Lee again resumed studies in 1945 at ‘National Southwestern Associated University’ in Kunming under the guidance of Professor Ta-You Wu.

He was nominated by Professor Ta-You Wu for a Chinese government fellowship to undergo graduate studies in the US. Therefore after completing his sophomore year at ‘National Southwestern Associated University’, in 1946 he moved to the US and joined ‘University of Chicago’, where he came under the guidance of Professor Enrico Fermi.

In 1950 he joined ‘University of California’ at Berkeley as a research associate and lecturer in physics and served there till 1951. He also worked briefly at ‘Yerkes Astronomical Observatory’ at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

From 1951 to 1953 he served at ‘Institute for Advanced Study’ in Princeton, New Jersey. Here he got reunited with Chen-Ning Franklin Yang whom he knew from his Kunming days.

Soon he became reputed for his scientific works in astrophysics, statistical mechanics, elementary particles, condensed matter physics, field theory and turbulence.

In 1953 he was inducted as Assistant Professor by ‘Columbia University’ where he started off working on renormalizable field theory model, better known as ‘Lee Model’. In 1955 he was made Associate Professor and in 1956 a Professor at the university, thus becoming the youngest full professor ever in the faculty of the university. He retired in 2012.

He remained closely associated with Yang even after departing from Princeton and worked out a regime to meet once a week whether in Princeton or in New York City.