BEIJING: Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel Prize winner, died at 103 of illness in Beijing on October 18, state news outlet Xinhua said on Saturday.

Born in Hefei in Anhui province in eastern China in 1922, Yang shared a Nobel Prize for physics with Tsung-Dao Lee in 1957. He was also a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University.

Yang, whose name is also rendered as Yang Zhenning, studied for his doctorate at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, and was the first Chinese scientist to visit China when diplomatic relations between the United States and China began to open up in the 1970s.

Since 1999, Yang had been teaching at Tsinghua University, where he also spent eight years of his childhood when his father was a professor at Tsinghua.

Tsinghua greyed out the colours on its website on Saturday in remembrance of Yang.

“My life has been a circle, where I started out from a point, travelled a long way, and finally returned to where I came from,” Yang was cited as saying by Tsinghua.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2025