Tsung-Dao Lee

He was born in Shanghai on November 24, 1926, to a family whose ancestral home was Suzhou, Jiangsu, the third of six children of the merchant Tsing-Kong Lee and Ming-Chang Chang. The research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings prints his date of birth as November 25, 1926; the Physics History Network record prints November 11, 1926, in its header and November 24 in its list of “Important Dates.” The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that his given name, Tsung-Dao, was chosen by his grandfather.⁠[1][2][3][4][5]

His father was a merchant in the chemical industry; his mother kept the household and liked to find books for the family library. Sources differ on his father’s name and occupation: the autobiography he supplied to NobelPrize.org in 2007 and the Associated PressAssociated PressThe Associated Press is a cooperative news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it is the oldest and largest news agency in the United States.Open the full entry obituary print Tsing-Kong Lee, the Physics History Network record prints Tsin-Kong Lee, and the research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings prints Chun-Kang Lee and describes him as an industrial chemist and businessman who had graduated from the University of Nanking; the Associated Press obituary, citing the newspaper Wenhui Daily, calls him a merchant, and the autobiography gives no occupation. The same obituary, again citing Wenhui Daily, adds that his mother was a devout Catholic. Columbia College Today quotes him as saying that he grew up in “a family of learning,” and the CERN Courier obituary describes him as born to an intellectual family in Shanghai.⁠[6][1][2][5][4][7]

In 1935 he entered the primary school attached to Qingxin Middle School, a private school in Shanghai; in 1938, amid the war, he moved to the middle school attached to Soochow University of Suzhou, which had relocated to the foreign concessions of Shanghai. The chronology says that he could not finish his studies at the primary school because of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. A Soochow University report gives his years at the attached middle school as 1938 to 1941. In his autobiography he wrote that he received most of his high school education in Shanghai.⁠[3][8][9][1]

Unwilling to study under Japanese occupation, he left home for the interior, reached Ganzhou, Jiangxi, in the summer of 1942 and, after recovering from an illness, entered the Christian Union Middle School in Ganxian. The school was short of teachers; he taught himself from senior-secondary and university textbooks, taught mathematics and physics to the lower classes, and left for Guiyang to sit the university entrance examination without graduating. The chronology records that at a hostel in Ganzhou he suffered from acute malaria, dysentery and scabies and from hunger and cold. The CERN Courier obituary notes that he neither completed high school nor graduated from university; the biographical sketch of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library calls the doctorate of 1950 the only diploma he received in his life.⁠[3][8][7]

In 1943, without a secondary-school diploma, he passed the entrance examination on the basis of equivalent standing and entered National Chekiang University (now Zhejiang University), then relocated to Guizhou; admitted to an engineering department, he transferred almost at once to physics, attended classes at Yongxingchang in Meitan, Guizhou, and was taught by professors including Shu Xingbei and Wang Ganchang. Two accounts exist of the department that first admitted him: the chronology and the biographical sketch of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library name electrical engineering, the chronology having him move to physics before term began and the sketch at the start of term; Columbia College Today, the CERN Courier obituary and the research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings name chemical engineering, and Columbia College Today and the Lindau profile add that he changed departments after professors recognized his aptitude for physics. The chronology also records that he made his way from Jiangxi through Guangdong and Guangxi to Guizhou and that Shu Xingbei came for half a day each week to guide him.⁠[3][8][6][7][4]

In the summer of 1945 he passed an examination and transferred to National Southwest Associated University in Kunming as a second-year student of physics, where he was guided by Ta-You Wu. The university had been formed in wartime by Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University. The chronology records that Yang Guanbei, the husband of his father’s sister, asked a friend, Liang Dapeng, to write a letter introducing him to Ta-You Wu. Sources date his university years differently: his autobiography gives 1943–1944 at National Chekiang University and 1945 at National Southwest Associated University; the research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings has him transfer in 1944; an obituary in The Paper gives 1944–1946 for the two universities together; and the Physics History Network record places the first university in Hangzhou and the second in Changsha.⁠[3][1][7][4][10][5]

In the spring of 1946, on the recommendation of Ta-You Wu and Ye Qisun, he received a Chinese government fellowship to study in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry. That autumn, with only two years of undergraduate study, he was admitted by exception to the graduate school of the University of Chicago, one of the few American universities that accepted doctoral students without a formal degree.⁠[3][4][1]

In the spring of 1948 he passed the doctoral qualifying examination, and Enrico FermiEnrico FermiEnrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian-American physicist who received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1942 led the team that achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.Open the full entry chose him as his doctoral student.⁠[3][1]

In 1949 he published his first paper, written with M. Rosenbluth and Chen Ning Yang. It showed that beta decay, muon capture and muon decay have very similar coupling constants, suggesting that they are manifestations of a single interaction, and speculated that weak interactions might be carried by heavy bosons. It was the first product of his collaboration with Chen Ning Yang.⁠[4][11]

He received his Ph.D. in June 1950. His dissertation, “Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars,” was in theoretical astrophysics; using stability arguments, it showed that less than one percent of such a star could be hydrogen, so that white dwarfs must be at the end point of stellar evolution. The biographical sketch of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library notes that he was 24 when he received the degree. The Physics History Network record dates his graduate studies at the University of Chicago to 1946–1949 and lists Enrico Fermi as his Ph.D. advisor.⁠[1][4][3][8][5]

In June 1950 he married Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin.⁠[3][1]

In 1950 he was a research associate in astronomy at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, where he worked on hydrodynamics with S. Chandrasekhar for about eight months. A paper he published in 1951 proved that turbulence cannot occur in a two-dimensional fluid.⁠[5][4][11]

From 1950 to 1951 he was a research associate and lecturer at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry.⁠[5]

From September 1951 to June 1953 he was a member of the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, hired by its director at the time, J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was an American theoretical physicist and science administrator who directed the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.Open the full entry.⁠[12][13]

There he and Chen Ning Yang wrote two papers on the statistical mechanics of phase transitions, published in the Physical Review in 1952; they showed that different phases can have different thermodynamic functions, and one of them, on the lattice gas and the Ising model, led to the unit circle theorem.⁠[11][4][7]

In 1952–1953 he visited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where, inspired by discussions with John Bardeen, he applied field-theoretical methods with F. Low and D. Pines to the motion of slow electrons in polar crystals; the paper appeared in 1953. The work helped inspire the later BCS theory of superconductivity.⁠[7][11]

In 1953, aged 26, he joined Columbia University as an assistant professor of physics; he was promoted to associate professor in 1955 and to professor in 1956. At 29 he was then the youngest full professor in the university’s history.⁠[1][13][5]

In 1954 he introduced a soluble model of quantum field theory in which mass, charge and wave-function renormalization can be carried out exactly; it became known as the Lee model.⁠[4][11]

The physics department he joined had nearly a dozen faculty members who had won or would go on to win a Nobel Prize. The Physics History Network record lists Norman Christ and Gerald Feinberg as having been advised by him at Columbia University.⁠[13][5]

Since the early 1950s physicists had been puzzled by the decays of two particles, the tau and the theta: they had the same mass and lifetime, but the tau decayed into three pions with a net parity of −1 and the theta into two pions with a net parity of +1. If parity was conserved, they had to be two different particles.⁠[14][4][15]

After the Rochester conference of April 1956 he reviewed the strange-particle data of Jack Steinberger’s group at Columbia University and suggested plotting them over the whole 360° range, but the statistics then available were too limited to decide whether parity was conserved.⁠[16]

With Chen Ning Yang, then at the Institute for Advanced Study, he examined the existing experimental evidence and concluded that parity conservation was well supported in strong and electromagnetic interactions but had never been tested in weak interactions. Their paper, “Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions,” was submitted to the Physical Review in June 1956 and published on October 1; it proposed several experiments that could test the question. The research page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library cites the paper as Physical Review 104, 254 (1956), with an erratum in volume 106, page 1371 (1957).⁠[4][7][11]

He did part of this work at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the summer of 1956, and he and Chen Ning Yang interpreted particle-decay results obtained at the laboratory’s Cosmotron accelerator. In the Physics World obituary Robert Crease says that he and Chen Ning Yang made regular Friday-afternoon trips to the nearby Westhampton beach, where they drew equations in the sand, and that they would also yell at each other so loudly that others could sometimes hear them down the hall.⁠[15][14]

Looking for an experimental test, he sought the advice of his Columbia University colleague Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry, who proposed using the beta decay of polarized cobalt-60 nuclei.⁠[16]

As published in October 1956, the paper also argued that there was no experimental proof of charge-conjugation (C) or time-reversal (T) invariance in weak interactions either.⁠[4]

By the end of December 1956 Chien-Shiung Wu and her collaborators at the National Bureau of Standards had a reproducible result: parity is not conserved in the beta decay of polarized cobalt-60. Leon Lederman, Richard Garwin and Marcel Weinrich at Columbia University’s Nevis cyclotron laboratory then detected the asymmetry in muon decay.⁠[16][4]

On January 15, 1957, Columbia University announced the discovery at a press conference attended by him, Chien-Shiung Wu and others. An article in The Paper of 2022 relays the recollection that Chien-Shiung Wu’s granddaughter Jada YuanJada YuanJada Yuan is a journalist who was a contributing editor at New York magazine, served in 2018 as the first “52 Places Traveler” of The New York Times and was afterward a reporter at The Washington Post until February 2026; she is a granddaughter of the physicists Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan.Open the full entry published in The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry in 2021: as soon as the experiment succeeded he shared the news with a group of Columbia University scientists, although her grandmother had asked him not to do so yet, which in Jada Yuan’s view bore directly on who would receive credit for the discovery; and Leon Lederman held back his paper at his request, a courtesy that, she writes, would have been unlikely had they not been colleagues at Columbia University.⁠[17]

Wolfgang PauliWolfgang PauliWolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) was a Vienna-born theoretical physicist who received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the exclusion principle, also called the Pauli principle, and who in 1930 proposed the neutral particle later named the neutrino; he was professor of theoretical physics at ETH Zurich from 1928 until his death.Open the full entry had at first been skeptical that parity could be violated; on January 19, 1957, he wrote to congratulate Chien-Shiung Wu. According to the biographical memoir of Chien-Shiung Wu published by the National Academy of Sciences, Pauli had at first thought these ideas only “mathematical play”; his letter, dated January 19, 1957, said: “I congratulate you (to the contrary of myself).”⁠[16]

In the same year he and Chen Ning Yang proposed the two-component theory of the neutrino, and with collaborators he extended the study of symmetries to the combined transformation of charge conjugation and space reflection (CP). The discovery of CP nonconservation in neutral K-meson decays in 1964 bore this work out.⁠[3][7]

The establishment of parity nonconservation led to the V–A theory of weak interactions in 1958 and laid groundwork for the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions a decade later.⁠[7]

On May 5, 1957, he received the Albert Einstein Award in Science.⁠[3][12]

In October of that year he and Chen Ning Yang were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1957, each receiving half, “for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles.” His affiliation at the time of the award was Columbia University.⁠[18][3]

The award ceremony took place in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, 1957. He was 31, the second-youngest scientist to win a Nobel Prize after Lawrence Bragg, who had won at 25; he and Chen Ning Yang were the first Chinese laureates. The Physics World obituary gives his age at the time of the prize as 30.⁠[2][14][4]

Chien-Shiung Wu did not share the prize. The research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings points out that her experimental paper was published in January 1957, that the statutes of the Nobel Foundation require work to have been published no later than the year before the award, and that she was not nominated in 1957 and was first nominated in 1958; the obituary in Physics World notes that it has been argued that she should have shared the prize too. He was later among those who nominated her. An article in The Paper says that several Nobel laureates, including him, nominated her for the prize, without success.⁠[4][14][17]

From September 1957 to June 1958 he was again a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and in 1957 he was also Loeb Lecturer at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[12][19]

With Chen Ning Yang, Huang Kesun and others he studied the statistical mechanics of a Bose system of hard spheres, and by 1960 they had built a general theoretical framework for the many-body problem and shown that an interacting Bose system can exhibit superfluidity. The research page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that his work on many-body problems in quantum statistical mechanics made an important contribution to the study of the superfluidity of helium II.⁠[3][8][4][11]

In 1959 he urged the study of weak interactions at high energies, which led his Columbia University colleague Melvin Schwartz to propose experiments with high-energy neutrinos; in 1960 he and Chen Ning Yang published a paper discussing possible high-energy neutrino experiments. The experiment completed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1962 showed that there are two distinct neutrinos, the electron neutrino and the muon neutrino. The same page also credits him with proposing the two-component neutrino theory.⁠[3][11][12]

In 1959 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[5]

In 1960 he was appointed a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute’s record lists him on the faculty of the School of Mathematics, to which its physicists then belonged, from September 1960 to June 1962; the Physics History Network and the chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library give the appointment as 1960–1963, during which he was also a professor at Columbia University.⁠[20][12][5][3]

In 1962 he and Chen Ning Yang studied the interaction of charged vector mesons with the electromagnetic field.⁠[3]

In 1962 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.⁠[2][6][5]

His collaboration with Chen Ning Yang ended in the early 1960s. The research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings says that it “suddenly broke up” in 1961; the chronology of Chen Ning Yang’s life compiled by the Institute for Advanced Study of Tsinghua University enters “Ended collaboration with Lee” under 1962, and Chen Ning Yang, in an article of 2010, likewise dates their break to 1962. Each side has given its own account of how and why it happened.⁠[4][21][22]

An article of 2010 in the magazine Oriental Outlook (Liaowang Dongfang Zhoukan), drawing on the biography of him by Ji Cheng (published by the International Culture Publishing Corporation), whom the article identifies as a son of the scholar Ji Xianlin, sets out his side’s account: he came to the United States in 1946 and went to the University of Chicago, where the two first met; Chen Ning Yang, already a teaching assistant there, had booked rooms at the university’s International House for him and his companions on word from Ta-You Wu; Chen Ning Yang went to the Institute for Advanced Study as a visiting member in the autumn of 1949 and invited him to come and work with him, and in September 1951 he arrived in Princeton with his wife. In the biography’s telling, when the two wrote two papers on statistical mechanics in the autumn of 1951, Chen Ning Yang proposed that, if he did not mind, his own name should come first, since he was four years older; and in 1957 Chen Ning Yang asked that at the presentation of the Nobel Prize he receive the prize ahead of him, in order of age.⁠[23]

Chen Ning Yang, in his article of 2010, gives a different account of the order of names: he dates the two statistical-mechanics papers to 1952 and writes that to sign both Yang–Lee would have been the normal order, but that he had at first actually planned to put Tsung-Dao Lee’s name first on both, and that it was only because he partly accepted the advice of his wife, Tu Chih-li, that one paper was signed Yang–Lee and the other Lee–Yang.⁠[22]

Of the events of 1962 the Oriental Outlook article, following the biography, relates that Jeremy Bernstein wrote an article for The New Yorker about the two men’s work on the parity question, published on May 12, 1962; that he received the proofs in April and made few changes, but that Chen Ning Yang raised many objections, saying that parts of the article were painful and that he wanted to discuss them; that the next day Chen Ning Yang came to his home and asked that wherever the article said that Lee and Yang had written something a note be added explaining that the order was merely alphabetical, and that Chen Ning Yang telephoned that evening to say that the notes might be dropped but that the article must put Yang before Lee throughout; and that he, disappointed, could only propose that they no longer work together. The biography says that Chen Ning Yang then became very agitated and began to cry, saying that he very much wanted to continue the collaboration, that Tsung-Dao Lee felt there was nothing he could do, and that in the end the two agreed to suspend it. In November of that year, by the same account, he handed a letter of resignation to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who greatly regretted this and remarked sharply that Tsung-Dao Lee should give up high-energy physics and that Chen Ning Yang should see a psychiatrist. The Oriental Outlook article notes that this is only Tsung-Dao Lee’s side’s account and that Ji Cheng tried to include Chen Ning Yang’s statements in the biography for balance. Chen Fangzheng, a scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, likewise traces the falling-out roughly to Bernstein’s article. Ji Cheng is quoted as saying that he set out the facts of the two men’s quarrel without drawing a conclusion; Chen Ning Yang’s article of 2010 was written in response to the biography and contests a number of its statements.⁠[23][24][22]

An article by Cao Kefan, carried on February 1, 2012, in Shuzhai (Book Digest) on the Guangming Online e-paper site and excerpted from his book Beihuan Zichou (Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, July 2011), records both details in the same way: it quotes his account that Chen Ning Yang became emotional at the time and began to weep, saying that he very much wanted to work with him, and it records J. Robert Oppenheimer’s remark, listing it among the reactions of physicists who knew both men after the break, without saying to whom or when it was made. In the same account, as Cao Kefan quotes it, he relates that in June of that year, when Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger were about to publish their experimental results on a second kind of neutrino, Chen Ning Yang once again became very anxious and was worried about the order in which their paper mentioned the two men’s names; that, much to his surprise, Chen Ning Yang then wrote him several letters that were extremely unpleasant and full of hostility; and that he felt very sad about all this and realized that their friendship no longer existed. This is his side’s account only. The same article gives Chen Ning Yang’s side: when Jeremy Bernstein proposed to write the article, Chen Ning Yang feared that Bernstein, being on closer terms with Tsung-Dao Lee, would overpraise Lee in the article or even distort history, and asked J. Robert Oppenheimer to try to stop its publication; and it quotes Chen Ning Yang’s own recollection that on April 18, 1962, the two had a long talk in his office and went over everything that had happened since 1946 and found that, apart from a few points, they remembered all the key events the same way; that, as when a conflict within a family is reconciled, it was a process of emotional release and both felt the relief that follows, but that the reconciliation did not last and a few months later they parted for good. Chen Ning Yang’s article of 2010 replying to Ji Cheng’s biography does not mention the weeping or J. Robert Oppenheimer’s remark.⁠[25][22]

In 1963 he returned to Columbia University. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry has him taking up the university’s first Enrico Fermi professorship of physics on his return; the Physics History Network and the chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library date his appointment to the chair to 1964.⁠[20][5][3]

In 1964 he and Michael Nauenberg analyzed the divergences associated with particles of zero rest mass; their method, together with a result obtained independently by Toichiro Kinoshita in 1962, became known as the Kinoshita–Lee–Nauenberg (KLN) theorem and later served as a reference for the behavior of gluons in quantum chromodynamics. The research page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library calls the KLN theorem “an indispensable theorem in strong interaction experiments.”⁠[4][11]

After CP nonconservation was discovered that same year he proposed several models of it, and from then on he worked on violations of time-reversal invariance in weak interactions.⁠[3][20]

In 1964 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[5]

In 1965–1966 he and Chien-Shiung Wu completed a review of weak interactions.⁠[3]

In 1966 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1967 he published work on the algebra of fields with Steven Weinberg and B. Zumino.⁠[3][11]

In the 1960s he and Giancarlo Wick studied the unitarity of the S-matrix with an indefinite metric, and in 1970 they proposed a theory of quantum electrodynamics that is relativistically invariant, gauge invariant, unitary and free of divergences.⁠[11]

In 1968 he lectured at CERN.⁠[7]

Chen Fangzheng traced the course of the dispute in the newspaper Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo) in 2011: twenty years after the collaboration ended in 1962, the conflict finally broke out from private into public. In the summer of 1970 Tsung-Dao Lee lectured on the history of weak interactions at a summer school in Erice, centering on the discovery of parity nonconservation; Chen Fangzheng, who attended the school, writes that afterward it seemed as if he had not heard Chen Ning Yang’s name from beginning to end. Chen Ning Yang’s article likewise dates the lecture to 1970 and says that its text was published in a book in 1971. In 1983 Chen Ning Yang recounted the discovery in the commentary to his Selected Papers (1945–1980), with Commentary and held that Tsung-Dao Lee had deliberately distorted that history (Chen Fangzheng gives the wording of the English original as “implied and insinuated various things”). Tsung-Dao Lee then circulated as a preprint an account of his own, later included in his selected papers of 1986, which he described as entirely personal and drawn from his own recollection. A biography of Chen Ning Yang by Chiang Tsai-chien, published in Taipei in 2002, largely adopted Chen Ning Yang’s account; its author states in a postscript that because he had opposed Tsung-Dao Lee’s efforts to bring Taiwan into an American high-energy particle collider project, Tsung-Dao Lee ignored his requests for an interview. On April 3, 2003, Tsung-Dao Lee gave an interview to Yang Xujie of the newspaper Science Times (Kexue Shibao), and Ji Cheng, Liu Huaizu, Teng Li and others compiled the interview and related documents into a collection of materials on the dispute, published in 2004 by Gansu Science and Technology Press and, in Hong Kong, by Tiandi Tushu. After Ji Cheng’s biography appeared in 2010, Chen Ning Yang replied in the China Reading Weekly (Zhonghua Dushu Bao) on March 17 and in the journal Twenty-First Century in April.⁠[24][22][21]

Tsung-Dao Lee’s account is that the breakthrough in thinking on parity nonconservation was made by him alone in early April 1956 and had nothing to do with Chen Ning Yang. He said so in his answers to the Science Times in 2003, and both Chen Fangzheng’s article and Chen Ning Yang’s article of 2010 quote the statement. He added that Chen Ning Yang joined in only in May, and that in early May 1956 he accepted Chen Ning Yang’s request and agreed that the two should work together; of the 2002 biography he said that Chen Ning Yang wanted to rewrite history through it. Ji Cheng’s biography, as summarized by Oriental Outlook, has Chen Ning Yang driving from Long Island to Columbia University one morning in late April or early May 1956 to see him; as the restaurant was not yet open, the two talked over coffee at the White Rose café at 125th Street and Broadway, where Chen Ning Yang at first vehemently opposed everything he said and was gradually persuaded only after repeated discussion. An article of 2010 in the magazine Bolan Qunshu cites his recollections of 1988 for the sequence that Jack Steinberger called on him in early May, that Chen Ning Yang came to Columbia University the next day and discussed the matter with him, and that he then called on Chien-Shiung Wu, who lent him a book on beta decay; the same article quotes him as saying that both he and Chen Ning Yang had raised the possibility of parity nonconservation at the Rochester conference of 1956.⁠[24][22][26][23]

Chen Ning Yang’s account is that the breakthrough was his. In the article of 2010 he writes that after he presented a result at Brookhaven National Laboratory in May 1956, Walter Selove asked him why so many terms canceled; unable to answer at once, he thought hard for a day or two and, on a day around the middle of May, suddenly saw that the concept of the pseudoscalar had to be introduced to make sense of it. To the question whether the insight was his or Tsung-Dao Lee’s he answers that it was his, adding that he has no ironclad proof of this but proof that he rates as 80 to 90 percent credible. He holds that Tsung-Dao Lee’s version reverses who was the principal and who the secondary partner in their work, contrary to the impression of colleagues at the time, and writes that between 1968 and 1971 Tsung-Dao Lee had lectured on the history of weak interactions in several places, including Erice, CERN, Columbia University and Rutgers University, whereas he himself first replied publicly in his selected papers of 1983, so that those lectures and the publication of the Erice text were the source of all their public disputes. The Oriental Outlook article cites a postscript he wrote in 1982 on how the prize-winning paper came about, in which he says that it occurred to him that the symmetry of the production process should be separated from that of the decay process and that Tsung-Dao Lee at first opposed the idea.⁠[22][23]

Chen Fangzheng does not rule for either man. He writes that outsiders can hardly pass judgment on the dispute and that it cannot be settled by smoothing it over, that in the end right and wrong must still be decided, but that this will very probably happen only when much time has passed and nothing matters any more; he compares it to the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of the calculus, but says that he dares not say whether this dispute can be seen in the same way. The Bolan Qunshu article, by Pan Chen, argues against Tsung-Dao Lee’s side, concluding that the evidence offered for his having led the solution of the parity question does not agree with the facts recorded in earlier literature; it holds that Tsung-Dao Lee’s three retrospective pieces of 1971, 1986 and 1988 say only that the need to study pseudoscalars became clear to him in May 1956, not that he had proposed the idea alone; it cites Chien-Shiung Wu’s recollection of 1972 that Tsung-Dao Lee came to her office one day in the early spring of 1956 and argues that what she recalled took place in early May, and cites a recollection of 1988 by Schwartz that the data, analyzed again at the time, did not suffice for any conclusion; it also points out that the record of the 1956 Rochester conference shows Chen Ning Yang raising the possibility that parity was not conserved but contains no record of Tsung-Dao Lee speaking there. The Oriental Outlook article quotes Ji Cheng as writing that after both men visited China in 1972, their differences over the development of high-energy physics there were strongly colored by personal feeling. The Physics History Network record for Tsung-Dao Lee lists Chen Ning Yang as co-recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize and as a colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study.⁠[24][26][23][5]

An article by Chiang Tsai-chien published in the China Reading Weekly in 2007 relates that in April 2006 a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of parity nonconservation, organized by N. Koller, a former student of Chien-Shiung Wu, was held in Dallas, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry; Chien-Shiung Wu’s son Yuan Weicheng, also a physicist, spoke there on his mother’s life and work, and he and Leon Lederman also gave talks. On April 22, 2006, he and Chen Ning Yang, once close collaborators who had later quarreled and broken with each other, met at the symposium. He spoke first, on some neutrino research and on Chien-Shiung Wu and her experiment, without touching on his former collaboration with Chen Ning Yang; Leon Lederman then spoke on another experiment he had carried out at that time, and Chen Ning Yang was in the audience for both talks. In the next session Chen Ning Yang gave a talk entitled “In which direction is the door?”, which likewise did not touch on the sensitive question of their collaboration.⁠[27]

After relations between China and the United States eased in 1972, he wrote to Zhu Guangya and sent word to Zhou Peiyuan through a visiting delegation of American scientists that he wished to visit. On September 19 he and his wife returned to China for the first time, 26 years after he had left for the United States.⁠[28][29]

His first stop was Shanghai, where he visited Fudan University.⁠[30]

On the morning of October 13, at a symposium chaired by Zhou Peiyuan in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, he met more than thirty scientists and advised that China’s high-energy physics follow its own path and strengthen international exchange and the training of talent. On October 14 Zhou Enlai received him in the Great Hall of the People.⁠[28]

During the visit he noticed that universities and research institutes tended to favor applied work over basic science, especially theory, and that the training of theorists had been interrupted.⁠[31]

In 1973, with Zhou Enlai’s approval, he sent his elder son to study at Fudan University. In June of that year, when a Chinese high-energy physics delegation toured five high-energy physics laboratories in the United States, he, Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry, Chien-Shiung Wu and others hosted it. An article of September 2024 in Fudan, the Fudan University newspaper, names this son as Li Zhongqing. An article in The Paper of August 11, 2024, writes that the delegation consisted of 14 physicists, among them Zhang Wenyu, Zhu Hongyuan and Fang Shouxian, and spent several weeks visiting the five major American high-energy physics laboratories; he also personally arranged for it to meet an official the article describes as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy, who was then at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and through his introductions the delegation established its first contacts with the major American high-energy physics laboratories.⁠[30][28]

In the 1970s he proposed that CP violation might originate in spontaneous symmetry breaking of the vacuum.⁠[7]

In 1974 he and Giancarlo Wick published a study of vacuum stability in quantum field theory, showing that broken symmetries of the vacuum could be partially restored and that high-energy collisions of heavy ions might achieve this with observable effects. The work opened the study of the vacuum of quantum chromodynamics, phase transitions, the quark–gluon plasma and relativistic heavy-ion physics.⁠[7][4][11]

In May 1974 he and his wife made a second visit to China. At Fudan University in Shanghai he was troubled to find that training in basic science had been much shortened; after seeing how a dance school in Shanghai selected and trained young performers, he wrote a proposal that a small, select corps of basic-science workers be organized outside the universities, chosen from youngsters of about thirteen or fourteen and trained from that age. Huang Qingqiao of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in an article published by The Paper, gives the proposal a title that translates as “Some Thoughts after Visiting Fudan University” and writes that it was passed to Zhou Enlai through Zhu Guangya on May 22. The sources differ on the date and title of the proposal. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that he arrived in Beijing on May 19 and wrote to Zhou Enlai, the letter being the proposal with the title that translates as “Some Thoughts after Visiting Fudan University”; He Haohua’s article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi gives the title as “Some Thoughts after Visiting Fudan University in Shanghai” and says that on May 20 he asked Zhu Guangya to pass it to Zhou Enlai and asked Zhou Enlai to pass it on to Mao Zedong; the article in Fudan, the Fudan University newspaper, gives the same longer title and says that he submitted it to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and the report in The Paper of August 5, 2024, on the tribute of the University of Science and Technology of China calls it a proposal on training basic-science talent. He Haohua names the school he visited as the Shanghai Dance Academy, says that its selection and training of dancers inspired him, and quotes the proposal as calling for a very small, select corps of basic-science workers, chosen from among the people and not cut off from them, to be organized outside the universities, with selection starting at about 13 or 14; in his recollection of 2005 he described the proposal as selecting a very small number of suitable youngsters of about thirteen or fourteen from across the country to be trained at universities, and the report in The Paper gives its content in the same terms.⁠[32][31][30][33]

The proposal was passed to Zhou Enlai through Zhu Guangya. On the evening of May 24 Zhou Enlai received him and his wife in the Great Hall of the People, with Deng Xiaoping and others present and nearly twenty scientists in attendance; Zhou Enlai held that his proposal could be tried. Afterward he wrote a supplementary note on the relation between basic and applied science. Huang Qingqiao writes that Zhou Enlai received his whole family on that occasion and records an exchange during the meeting: when he said that talent for basic science, like talent for ballet, had to be selected young, Jiang Qing broke in to ask whether a person was then no longer any good at 50; he replied by asking whether dancers were not trained from childhood; Jiang Qing said that dancers needed continuity; and Xie Jingyi said that the first question to settle was whom one served. At the end of the meeting, by the same account, Zhou Enlai told him that the proposal had been set in large type and sent to Mao Zedong to read. A footnote in the same article dates the meeting to May 26. He Haohua’s article names those present as Deng Xiaoping, who had just returned to office, Guo Moruo and others, and the nearly twenty prominent scientists in attendance as including Qian Xuesen, Wu Youxun and Zhou Peiyuan; Zhou Enlai told him, in words that translate as, “What you propose can certainly be tried; it is only one in a thousand.” The supplementary note he wrote afterward was titled, in translation, “A Supplementary Note on Basic Science and Applied Science.”⁠[32][33]

On May 30 Mao Zedong received him and said that he approved of his proposal on training talent. According to He Haohua’s article, Mao Zedong received him and his wife and said, in words that translate as, “I am in favor of your proposal on training talent.”⁠[32][3]

The proposal was not carried out that year. On March 8, 1978, the Special Class for the Gifted Young opened at the University of Science and Technology of China; it had been set up as a preparatory class for a group of students too young to enter the university directly and was renamed a few days before it opened. He Haohua’s article says that although Mao Zedong had approved of the proposal it was not put into effect that year; a 1975 plan for the University of Science and Technology of China to run a trial science secondary school was blocked during the campaign against the “right-deviationist wind,” when the draft was criticized and the trial school was held to run counter to the line of the “educational revolution.” In his recollection of 2005 he said that the country’s leaders had passed his proposal to the University of Science and Technology of China to carry out. The report in The Paper says that the university decided in 1977 to open the preparatory class.⁠[31][32]

He later recalled that the aim of the proposal had not been a class for the young as such but to break the neglect of basic science and of the training of talent of every kind. In April 1979 he visited the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei for the first time, met the teachers and students of the class and wrote an inscription for them. The date of the visit is given as April 19 by He Haohua’s article, which says that he lectured at the university and talked with the young students, and as April 20 by the report in The Paper; both record the inscription, which translates roughly as “Blue comes from indigo; there are successors to carry on.” He Haohua’s article adds that on January 27, 1983, the fifth anniversary of the class, he wrote an inscription that translates roughly as “Talent comes forth in every generation; creative work belongs to the young. With disciples all over the world, in education it is the University of Science and Technology of China”; that on May 2, 1984, he lectured at the university again, talked with the young students and said that the class was rare not only in the history of Chinese education but also internationally; and that on December 6, 1987, he wrote in advance an inscription for the class’s tenth anniversary, translating roughly as “New talent in every generation; heroes are found among the young. Congratulations to the Special Class for the Gifted Young of the University of Science and Technology of China on its tenth anniversary.” According to The Paper, he wrote an inscription congratulating the class on its 45th anniversary in 2023. He Haohua’s article gives the source of his recollection of the aim of the proposal as his essay of 2005 on the founding of the class, whose title translates as “The Founding of the Special Class for the Gifted Young and Reflections on It.”⁠[31][32]

From 1975 he and colleagues opened the field of non-topological solitons, and in 1978 he and R. Friedberg established the soliton model of hadrons.⁠[12][11][8]

In 1982 he, Norman Christ and R. Friedberg proposed random lattice field theory, which addressed the fermion-doubling problem of lattice gauge theory and the loss of translational and rotational invariance, and he promoted first-principles simulations of lattice quantum chromodynamics on supercomputers.⁠[11][7]

In 1983 he published work on a discrete formulation of quantum field theory and, with R. Friedberg, proposed discrete quantum mechanics. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library also records that in 1985–1986 he published a paper whose title translates as “Physics in Terms of Difference Equations,” proposing that the foundations of all of physics be expressed by a new set of difference equations rather than the traditional differential equations and showing that these difference equations yield continuous conservation laws for energy, momentum and angular momentum; he also published “Are Black Holes Black Bodies?” and a paper on the generalization of a radiation theorem, which, the chronology says, showed that Hawking’s theory of black holes is only an approximation.⁠[3]

In the second half of the 1980s, combining non-topological solitons with general relativity, he opened the study of soliton stars; in 1989 he and R. Friedberg proposed a boson–fermion model of superconductivity that combined Bose–Einstein condensation with BCS theory.⁠[11][8]

In 1976 he and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, discussed what accelerator would suit the start of high-energy physics in China and agreed on an electron–positron collider; Panofsky put the idea forward when he lectured in China. The sources differ on the month of Panofsky’s visit: Liu Huaizu’s article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi has September 1976, the chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library October 1976.⁠[34][3]

In February and March 1977 he made a third visit to China; meeting Hua Guofeng on February 27, he stressed the importance of basic science, and during the visit he proposed building an electron–positron collider. China had by then begun work on a proton accelerator; he did not favor that plan but held that the choice lay with China’s scientists and government and so did not voice opposition to the project; Liu Huaizu’s article says that he learned on his visit of February 1977 that China had begun Project 753.⁠[3][34]

In December 1977 he, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan and Chien-Shiung Wu wrote jointly to Zhang Wenyu, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, arguing that a new proton accelerator in China would need a higher energy to be of physical interest and recommending a plan that would save money and be rich in physics goals, namely an electron–positron collider. The advice was not taken at the time.⁠[34][17][3]

On January 8, 1978, he wrote to Fang Yi, vice premier and president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with suggestions on training experimental high-energy physicists; acting in a private capacity, he also contacted more than twenty American universities as well as Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. From July 1978 nearly 40 Chinese researchers were sent to high-energy physics laboratories and universities in the United States and to CERN; known in the United States as Lee scholars, they later formed the core of the teams that built and used the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider. Liu Huaizu’s article gives the title of his memorandum to Fang Yi, in translation, as “Some Suggestions on Training Experimental High-Energy Physicists,” and says that it recommended selecting visiting scholars from university physics departments across the country and not only from the Institute of High Energy Physics, and that Fang Yi accepted it. An article in The Paper of August 11, 2024, adds that he had already written several times to Zhang Wenyu, Fang Yi and others, that each of the three national laboratories he contacted said it would welcome Chinese physicists for long-term work, and that he also wrote on his own initiative to the person the article describes as director of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy.⁠[34][28]

In January 1979, during Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the United States, the two countries signed an implementing accord on cooperation in high-energy physics and set up a joint committee on high-energy physics; he had helped bring the cooperation about and sat on the committee as a member of the American side. Two accounts exist of the committee’s first meeting: the chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library has it held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the United States, while Liu Huaizu, writing in the journal Xiandai Wuli Zhishi (Modern Physics), has it held at the Beijing Hotel on June 10–12, 1979, and adds that the committee then met once a year, alternately in the two countries, until 2017, the tenth meeting taking place as scheduled in the United States in November 1989.⁠[3][33][34]

In the spring of 1979, at the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he gave two lecture courses in the Science Hall in Beijing, on statistical mechanics and on field theory and particle physics, to nearly a thousand scholars and graduate students from more than 80 universities and research institutions in 26 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library dates the lectures to May 1979. The English page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library gives April 1979; the chronology adds that the invitation came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.⁠[35][36][3]

China then had no channel for sending graduate students to North America and no GRE or TOEFL examinations. During the lectures he asked professors of Columbia University’s physics department to set a paper at the level of the department’s graduate admission and send it to Beijing; five students were chosen by the examination and admitted by the department. Two pilot examinations were held in 1979, sending 18 students to the United States, and on December 26–29, 1979, Columbia University and six other institutions admitted 13 Chinese graduate students. The Chinese page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that the first Pre-CUSPEA pilot examination was held with the help of Yan Jici, president, and Wu Tang, vice-president, of the Graduate School of the University of Science and Technology of China.⁠[37][38][35]

He named the scheme the China–U.S. Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA): students who were admitted became regular graduate students of the American universities, which bore their tuition, living and medical costs until they obtained the doctorate, and he suggested that the universities do so by appointing them as research or teaching assistants. On February 1, 1980, he sent more than 200 identical letters to the physics departments of 53 American universities; on May 13 the Chinese Ministry of Education issued the notice inviting applications, and the program formally began. Liu Huaizu, interviewed by The Paper, puts the number of American universities he wrote to at more than 40.⁠[37][38][39]

In 1980, 47 American universities recruited the first class of 127 graduate students in China. The program was originally to run until 1986; in 1985 he decided to extend it by three years, and it ended in 1989. From 1979 to the final intake in 1989, 915 students went to North America through it. The three institutions with the most successful candidates were the University of Science and Technology of China (218), Peking University (206) and Fudan University (127). The article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi counts 15 of the 915 who later became members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or academies in Europe, Canada and Britain; an article in The Paper states that 11 students of Shanghai Jiao Tong University went abroad through the program between 1980 and 1987. The sources word the span of the program differently: the Chinese page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library has it running from the pilot examinations of 1979 to the final intake of 1988–89; the main text of the library’s English page has 1979 to 1989, a caption to a photograph of 1986 has 1980 to 1988, and another passage refers to “the decade 1978-1989”; The Paper’s obituary of August 5, 2024, has 1979 to 1989. The memorial article of Columbia University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences says that “more than 900 of the top Chinese undergraduates in physics came to the US over a ten-year period” for doctoral study through the program; the English biography of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute says that it trained 915 Ph.D. students. For Fudan University, the library’s English page gives 127 students, whereas an article of September 2024 in Fudan, the Fudan University newspaper, speaks of more than 200 Fudan students in the program. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library also records that in January 1980 he formally submitted the CUSPEA examination plan to the Chinese government.⁠[3][38][36][35][40][41][42][39][30]

He handled much of the liaison work himself, paying the postage and long-distance telephone charges out of his own pocket, and it took about a third of his time and energy each year. The model was later extended to biochemistry and chemistry, and the programs together selected more than 1,600 students to go to the United States. The article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi describes how every candidate’s transcripts and other papers came to him and were sorted by him, his wife Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin and his secretary before being sent on to the universities the candidates had applied to, and how most of the CUSPEA students who studied at Columbia University in the 1980s saw the couple and the secretary in the office after hours sorting papers and sticking on stamps; in 1983 he volunteered to act as the contact between the American universities and the candidates; when students fell ill after reaching the United States he helped contact their relatives and sent them books in their field; he advised students who wished to change fields; and when students who had fallen in love through the examination wanted to retake it in order to transfer to the same university, he wrote letters for them and recommended that a second round of examinations be arranged. He said that the work was a heavy burden on him but that he felt it his duty to repay in this way the country, the schools and the teachers that had given him the chance to grow and develop. Addressing a symposium of CUSPEA scholars on June 5, 2002, he said that in some respects CUSPEA was more meaningful than his work on parity nonconservation.⁠[38][8]

At the beginning of 1981 China’s high-energy proton accelerator project was halted during a readjustment of the national economy. He telephoned China three times, on January 14, 19 and 23, urging that the American side be formally notified and that representatives be sent to the United States for talks; the living allowances of the more than forty Lee scholars then in the United States were stopped, and he helped each of them find support from American sources.⁠[34]

In March 1981, at informal talks at Fermilab, he and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky again proposed building an electron–positron collider. After Zhu Hongyuan, deputy director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, and Xie Jialin conferred with him, Panofsky, Chien-Shiung Wu, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan and experts from several American high-energy physics laboratories, all agreed that China should build a 2×2.2 GeV electron–positron collider, at about one third of the cost of the proton accelerator project and usable for synchrotron-radiation research as well. Liu Huaizu’s article says that at the meeting Panofsky put forward the plan for a 2×2.2 GeV electron–positron collider, stressing that such a machine would be at the frontier of charm physics and could be fitted with synchrotron-radiation equipment for research of near-term benefit to the economy, and that it would not cost much: about 30 million U.S. dollars, then about 90 million yuan, which was just what remained of the pre-research funds of Project 87; most of those present agreed. An article in The Paper of 2022 on Chien-Shiung Wu relates that at the beginning of 1981, when Project 87, the 40 GeV high-energy proton accelerator, was halted in the readjustment of the economy, Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan consulted with him on how to advance an experimental base for high-energy physics in China; it puts the cost of the collider at one third of that of Project 87 and says that the plan was approved after much effort, above all his frequent communication with Deng Xiaoping and Fang Yi. The Paper’s article of August 11, 2024, writes that Zhu Hongyuan and Xie Jialin went to the United States at his urging and on Fang Yi’s instructions, and that the talks were held with him, officials of the U.S. Department of Energy and the directors of the major American high-energy physics laboratories.⁠[28][17][34]

In October 1981 some on the Chinese side wanted to revert to a proton accelerator, and he held out for the collider. In December he returned to China to bury his father’s ashes, and in talks with the Chinese Academy of Sciences on December 19 he stated that he would withdraw from the joint committee on high-energy physics if the plan was not formally approved. On December 22 Deng Xiaoping endorsed the collider plan in writing, and on December 25 he received him and gave a dinner for him. Liu Huaizu’s article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi records what he said to the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the time: if the Chinese government wished to continue the two countries’ cooperation in high-energy physics it had to produce a plan quickly; otherwise it would amount to declaring the two governments’ cooperation agreement broken off. On the change of October, Liu Huaizu’s article says that the Chinese Academy of Sciences had decided to send Deng Zhaoming, head of its Division of Mathematics and Physics, with Zhu Hongyuan and Xie Jialin back to the United States on October 10 for further talks; on the eve of their departure the Presidium of the academy’s Academic Divisions suddenly decided that the project could not cost more than 70 million yuan and that the proton scheme should be adopted after all, and on arriving in the United States Deng Zhaoming’s group met him at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and conveyed the decision. The Paper’s article of August 11, 2024, describes Deng Zhaoming as deputy director of the academy’s Second Bureau and says that the presidium directed that only a 5 GeV proton scheme could be approved, because the collider exceeded the 70 million yuan left over from Project 87, and that it would have to wait until the economy improved. The same article says that on December 19 he declared that he had done his best for his country and put great effort into the work, that if the cooperation agreement were broken off he would have no choice but to announce his withdrawal from the joint committee, and that restoring it afterwards would then be unimaginably difficult; and that on December 22 Li Chang, Qian Sanqiang and other leaders of the academy sent an extra-urgent report to the Central Committee asking for approval of the collider plan and for continuation of the U.S.–China high-energy physics agreement, which Deng Xiaoping endorsed the same day, writing, in translation: “The project has come so far that it should not be interrupted; the course they propose is fairly practical. I am in favor of approving it, without further hesitation.”⁠[28][34]

On April 25, 1983, the State Council formally approved the plan to build the collider, and in December of that year the project was designated a key national project. The Paper’s article of August 11, 2024, specifies that what the State Council approved on April 25, 1983, was the request submitted by the State Planning Commission for approval of the construction plan of the 2×2.2 GeV collider; the English page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library, however, dates the Chinese government’s official approval to April 24, 1984. The sources also give two dates for its designation as a key project: the library’s Chinese page has December 15, 1983, when, it says, the Secretariat of the Central Committee heard a report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discussed his letter to the country’s leaders on building a high-energy accelerator in China, decided to list the collider among the key national projects and required it to be completed in about five years, the project being code-named 8312; The Paper’s article has December 25, 1983, when, it says, Hu Yaobang made the decision at the 103rd meeting of the Secretariat. He suggested adding synchrotron-radiation beamlines to the storage ring so that the machine could also serve applied research, and recommended engaging Panofsky, by then retired, as an adviser. According to The Paper’s article, the academy accepted his suggestion and invited Panofsky, who had retired as director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1984, as a senior adviser who would come to China twice a year for two weeks each time; Liu Huaizu’s article says instead that the two sides formally agreed that Panofsky would come twice a year for two weeks each time to help at the Institute of High Energy Physics, but not under the title of adviser and without a fee, the Chinese side paying only the round-trip fares of him and his wife and their living costs in China. The Paper’s article also says that as early as the proposal of the collider plan he and other American scientists had pointed out that the machine could serve two purposes, and that while Gu Yu was helping to lead the project he and Panofsky explained the importance of synchrotron light to her several times.⁠[28][34][35][36]

Ground was broken for the collider on October 7, 1984. During construction he and Panofsky each came to China twice a year. Liu Huaizu’s article also relates that in 1985, when Gu Yu was, in the article’s words, falsely accused, he said that the commander could not be changed at such a moment and that if things went wrong again at that point he would be unable to help any further; in July of that year Deng Xiaoping, speaking with him about the matter, said that nobody was stopping her and that she should carry on. Liu Huaizu writes that they came to study the progress and problems of the construction closely and to give their views and suggestions to the leading group.⁠[34][28]

The first electron–positron collisions were achieved on October 16, 1988, and on October 24 he accompanied Deng Xiaoping on an inspection of the collider. The Physics World obituary has the collider switched on in 1989. Liu Huaizu’s article in Xiandai Wuli Zhishi prints the date of the first collisions as October 16, 1986, and relates that, delighted by the success, he at once put aside his work and flew from the United States to Beijing carrying a small golden horse; the same article dates the October 24 inspection to 1988 and says that Deng Xiaoping then gave an impromptu speech whose title translates as “China Must Have a Place in the World’s High Technology.” The Chinese page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library gives only October 1988 and quotes the People’s Daily of October 20 as calling the achievement another major breakthrough in high technology for China after its successful atomic and hydrogen bomb tests and the launch of its satellite.⁠[36][28][14][34][35]

He went on to support the upgrade of the collider and the international collaboration on the Beijing Spectrometer, and in 2004 he wrote to China’s leaders recommending a neutrino physics experiment at Daya Bay.⁠[8][41][7]

On February 21, 1981, he wrote to Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders, mentioning to them for the first time the idea of the postdoctoral researcher. Meeting Deng Xiaoping on March 9, 1983, he proposed setting up postdoctoral research stations and likened basic research, applied research and development to water, fish and the fish market. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library also records that in March 1982 he put forward a proposal on training young talent.⁠[35][3]

On May 21, 1984, Deng Xiaoping received him and his wife in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and heard his plan for a postdoctoral system; he suggested starting with a dozen or so pilot stations at selected universities and research institutes, and Deng Xiaoping agreed. In July 1985 the State Council formally approved the relevant report, establishing China’s postdoctoral system. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library notes that Deng Xiaoping was then chairman of the Central Advisory Commission and that the pilot stations he proposed were to be at universities and institutes with good research conditions and a strong academic atmosphere; afterwards he wrote again to the central leaders and to the heads of the State Science and Technology Commission, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Education with proposals for the arrangements for young postdoctoral researchers, covering a series of practical matters such as household registration, salaries, staffing quotas and housing, a letter that the library’s Chinese page dates to May 1984.⁠[35][3]

In May 1981, 89 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences wrote to the Chinese government proposing a national fund for the natural sciences. When Deng Xiaoping received him on July 16, 1985, he set out the importance of a national natural science foundation, and Deng Xiaoping expressed agreement. In February 1986 the National Natural Science Foundation of China was founded as a body directly under the State Council. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library records that on July 12, 1985, he submitted to Deng Xiaoping a proposal whose title translates as “Some Simple Thoughts on How to Promote the Quadrupling of the Gross Value of National Economic Output,” and that on July 16, when he proposed a natural science foundation, Deng Xiaoping endorsed his proposal for a postdoctoral system in China and decided on funding of 12,000 yuan per person per year. The library’s English page quotes Deng Xiaoping at the meeting of July 16: “All of us agree on the establishment of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and no one will oppose it.” Its Chinese page says that the academicians’ proposal was approved by the central leaders and that the science fund of the Chinese Academy of Sciences began operating in 1982.⁠[36][3][35]

In 1989 he proposed founding the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and declined a suggestion that it be named after him. The foundation was established in May 1990; he spoke at its inaugural ceremony and thereafter served as its honorary chairman.⁠[37][36]

Huang Qingqiao, a scholar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, counts at least 14 meetings between Deng Xiaoping and him from 1974 to 1989. By his count the two met every year from 1978 to 1989 except 1982, and three times in 1984; ten of the fourteen meetings are recorded in the Chronicle of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1997), while the other four are often overlooked by researchers, among other reasons because the Chronicle records them in too little detail.⁠[33]

He later became a University Professor at Columbia University, the university’s highest academic rank. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library and the research profile of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings give the year as 1983, the Physics History Network record as 1984. The Paper’s obituary of August 5, 2024, also gives 1983.⁠[4][3][5][41]

From 1985 to 1993 he was a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study. The Physics History Network record lists him as a member of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University from 1990. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library records that he met U.S. President George Bush at the White House in October 1989 and that in May 1993 he attended the ceremony at which the Pope rehabilitated Galileo.⁠[12][5][3]

On November 23, 1986, CUSPEA students held their third academic symposium at Columbia University and celebrated his 60th birthday.⁠[38]

On October 14, 1986, the Beijing Institute of Modern Physics, which he founded jointly with Peking University, was inaugurated with him as director.⁠[3][35]

On October 17, 1986, the China Center of Advanced Science and Technology (CCAST) was founded in Beijing. He helped the Chinese Academy of Sciences establish it in cooperation with the World Laboratory, with part of the funding provided by the Italian government; he served as its director and later as director for life. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that the funds for establishing the center included 2.8 million from the Italian government, without naming the currency.⁠[35][8][3][43]

On June 6, 1991, the Zhejiang Institute of Modern Physics, set up at his suggestion, was inaugurated at Zhejiang University with him as director; the Physics History Network dates his directorship from 1988.⁠[35][8][5][39]

His wife died in November 1996 and was later buried in the Overseas Chinese Cemetery in Dongshan, Wuzhong District, Suzhou. The grave is in the cemetery’s Wanlong section, and the altar in front of her gravestone is inscribed with lines of verse that he wrote in mourning for her. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library records that on November 25, 1996, Song Ping, Wen Jiabao, Zhou Guangzhao, Zhu Guangya and others congratulated him in Beijing on his 70th birthday.⁠[29][6][3]

In January 1998 he used his personal savings to establish the Hui-Chun Chin and Tsung-Dao Lee Chinese Undergraduate Research Endowment in memory of his wife, to support undergraduates in research internships. Peking University, Fudan University, Lanzhou University and Soochow University were the first pilot institutions; National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan joined in 2000 and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2013. An article in The Paper describes the endowment as set up by him and his family from their private savings. The English biography of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, however, dates the establishment to 1997 and says that he and his family established it; the library’s English page records that the signing ceremony took place at Peking University in 1998.⁠[29][3][39][36]

The endowment stipulates that at least half of the students selected be women. In 2015 the host institution of its management committee moved to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. An article in The Paper says that the rule on women follows the wish of Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin.⁠[29][40][35]

In 1997 he brought about the founding of the RIKEN BNL Research Center by Brookhaven National Laboratory and Japan’s RIKEN, and he served as its first director until 2003 and afterward as director emeritus. The center had no permanent positions and recruited researchers from around the world.⁠[3][15][4]

In 1998 the theory group of Columbia University’s physics department, under his leadership, designed and, with IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry, built two QCDSP supercomputers dedicated to quantum chromodynamics, installed at Columbia University and at the RIKEN BNL Research Center; in 2004 the center and the Columbia University group he led completed a faster successor. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library dates the two machines of 1998 to August, describing them as the fastest computers in the world at the time, at 1.1 trillion operations per second, and describes the machine of 2004 as a ten-trillion-operations-per-second supercomputer.⁠[3]

Nick Samios, a former director of the laboratory, recalled that after the ISABELLE collider project was canceled in the 1980s he encouraged Brookhaven National Laboratory to shift its emphasis from particle physics to nuclear physics, to search for the quark–gluon plasma and to build the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). RHIC was completed in 2000, and in 2005 the quark–gluon plasma was discovered in its experiments.⁠[15][42]

In 2006 he wrote five physics papers, on new developments in the study of the quark–gluon plasma and on new ways of solving the Schrödinger equation. In 2008 he and R. Friedberg published work relating the neutrino mixing matrix and the quark CKM matrix to the masses of leptons and quarks, and in 2009 they introduced the concept of the timeon. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library records that on October 12, 2008, he gave a lecture at an event marking the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope. The research page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library lists “New Ways to Solve the Schroedinger Equation,” written with R. Friedberg, in Annals of Physics, volume 316 (2005).⁠[37][11][3]

On September 13, 2011, Columbia University held a reception at the President’s House to mark his retirement, at which President Lee Bollinger spoke; he handed out a 231-page booklet of some of the research papers he had published since 2006. The booklet carried a saying of Confucius, “Pleasure is learning and being able to practice often-times what one has learned.” Bollinger said that he had “succeeded into his 84th year in continuing to push the boundaries of the study of particle physics.” He himself compared retirement to gardening: “You may not be cultivating a new species, but you can still keep the old beautiful thing going on.” Of choosing a highlight of his career he said: “It’s almost like, in the evening you look at the sky—is there one star that you particularly like?” Of Columbia University’s part in physics he said, “A very large portion was generated here,” and of its next generation of physicists, “I don’t know what they are going to do, but it will be great things, just like in the past.”⁠[13][14]

He retired in 2011 as University Professor and Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics, after nearly six decades on the university’s faculty. Columbia College Today gives his age at retirement as 84 and the CERN Courier obituary as 85; Britannica dates his retirement as professor emeritus to 2012.⁠[42][13][6][7][20]

Between his first paper in 1949 and his retirement in 2011 he published 321 papers.⁠[11]

He had given physics lecture notes and problem sets to Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1978, first visited it in 1979 and was appointed an honorary professor in 1987. An article in The Paper specifies that the 1978 gift consisted of three volumes of physics lecture notes and two volumes of physics problems, that on his 1979 visit he gave the Department of Engineering Mechanics an electronic computer and discussed exchanges of researchers and students, and that at the 1987 ceremony he urged the university’s students to hold fast to self-respect and self-confidence.⁠[40][44]

In 2010 he decided to give the university the manuscripts, medals and art he had collected over the years, together with his former residence in Shanghai. That year was also his last visit to China; in the 38 years from 1972 he had returned 49 times. The article in The Paper says that the decision followed several long late-night conversations with Zhang Jie, whom the chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library identifies as the university’s president at the time; the chronology enters his offer of the donation after these conversations under 2011.⁠[40][44][3]

From 2011 he donated, in stages and without payment, his original Nobel Prize medal, papers and manuscripts, letters, books, works of science and art, and the former residence on Wanping Road in Shanghai. In September of that year the Chinese Ministry of Education approved the construction of a library on the university’s Minhang campus.⁠[8][40]

The Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee Library was inaugurated on December 28, 2014, with him as honorary director. With a floor area of 6,500 square meters, it combines a library, an archive, a biographical museum, a science museum and an art museum, and its special-collections store holds more than 90,000 items from his donation. The library’s report on the memorial service of August 2024 puts the items donated since 2011 at more than 80,000; it also mentions that he read the outline of the library’s exhibition word by word, annotated it in his own hand and translated the exhibition’s theme.⁠[45][8][44]

In December 2014 he wrote to China’s leaders proposing that a world-class institute for basic science, modeled on the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, be built at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.⁠[8][44]

The Tsung-Dao Lee Institute was established at the university on November 28, 2016, to work on astronomy and astrophysics, particle and nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics. On April 7, 2018, he was appointed its honorary director. The Chinese page of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library says that the institute was set up on his proposal, with the endorsement of the country’s leaders and the strong support of national ministries and the Shanghai municipal government, with the aim of becoming a world-leading scientific research institution; that page gives only November 2016 as the date.⁠[39][35]

In March 2021, with his consent, the university set up the Tsung-Dao Lee Physics Class, which selects secondary-school graduates from across China.⁠[8][3]

He died at his home in San Francisco, United States, at 2:33 a.m. local time on August 4, 2024, aged 97. On August 5 the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, the Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee Library and CCAST jointly issued an obituary notice. The Associated Press attributed the news to a Chinese university and a research center; The Paper said that it had learned of the death from several of his friends, among them Wang Chuilin, his representative and deputy director of the academic committee of CCAST, and that Shanghai Jiao Tong University had confirmed it. The obituary notice gives his age as 97, while the headline in The Paper says 98.⁠[43][18][2][10]

On August 11 a memorial meeting was held at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, attended by more than 330 people. His son Li Zhongqing sent a message to the meeting whose title was taken from something his father said in his last days, words that translate as “I will always be a part of you; you will always be a part of me.” The message said that his father had shown great vitality in his last months: almost to the end he could walk a short distance with help, and after he was confined to bed he could still speak, think and talk with his family; he said again and again how much he loved his family and spoke more and more of his wish to be reunited with his wife, Li Zhongqing’s mother, and to go home.⁠[46][47]

On August 25 a memorial service was held at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, organized jointly by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Chinese Physical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, Peking University, Zhejiang University and the Institute of High Energy Physics, and streamed worldwide in Chinese and English. The service was chaired by Zhang Jie, with branch venues in Shanghai, Beijing and Hangzhou; the speakers included Young-Kee Kim, president of the American Physical Society, Michel Spiro, president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, Frank WilczekFrank WilczekFrank Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery, with David Gross and others, of asymptotic freedom in the strong interaction; he also introduced and developed the ideas of axions, anyons and time crystals and is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at MIT.Open the full entry, Wang Yifang and He Zuoxiu, and Ding Kuiling, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gave an account of his life; Zhang Jie said in his remarks that six of his results were of Nobel Prize caliber. His elder son Li Zhongqing spoke for the family, and his eldest grandson, Li Shanshi, also gave a reply; Li Zhongqing passed on words his father said in the last days of his life, which translate as “I will always be a part of you; you will always be a part of me.”⁠[44]

In August 2024 his son stated that his father’s wish had been to be buried with his mother in Suzhou, and Suzhou’s civil affairs authorities confirmed that the couple’s grave had long been chosen in the Overseas Chinese Cemetery in Dongshan. The son who made the statement was Li Zhongqing, who said that in November he and the family would bring his father’s ashes back to Suzhou for a burial ceremony; reporters of The Paper obtained the confirmation from the Suzhou civil affairs authorities on August 6, and the grave is in the cemetery’s Wanlong section. Liu Huaizu, interviewed by The Paper, said that he had helped arrange the grave in Suzhou and that after the burial ceremony in November the lettering on the gravestone would be painted black and white as a sign of mourning.⁠[29][37]

On November 24, 2024, his birthday, his ashes were buried in Suzhou. The Suzhou municipal Party committee and government held a commemorative event in his honor at Soochow University, attended by more than 600 people, among them representatives of his family. The report mentions that an internal seminar on his path in life was held on November 23. At the event his elder son Li Zhongqing said that Suzhou was where the family had its roots and was also the starting point of his father’s spirit, and that his father often spoke of the time he had spent there; his granddaughter Li Shanxuan presented the city, on the family’s behalf, with an inscription in his hand for the Suzhou Science and Technology Museum; a commemorative album on him and Suzhou was released; an exhibition on his life opened, to run at the Soochow University Museum until mid-January 2025; and the city gave the family a piece of Song brocade bearing a line in his calligraphy that translates roughly as “study the principles of things closely; what use is empty fame.”⁠[9]

He and Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin had two sons, James and Stephen. The Physics History Network record gives her name as Hui-Chun Chin and notes that the two married in 1950.⁠[1][5]

At his death he was survived by his two sons, a brother, a sister, seven grandchildren and a great-grandson. Columbia College Today names the brother as Xuedao Li and the sister as Yayun Li.⁠[6]

His elder son has been director of the Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee Library since its inauguration in 2014 and in 2024 was a chair professor in the Division of Humanities and Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Chinese-language coverage gives the elder son’s name as Li Zhongqing; a Soochow University report of November 2024 describes him as Yan Ai Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Reports of the commemorations held in 2024 also mention his eldest grandson, Li Shanshi, described as a professor, and a granddaughter, Li Shanxuan. The report in The Paper of August 5, 2024, on the tribute of the University of Science and Technology of China mentions that Li Zhongqing gave an academic lecture at the university on May 22, 2024.⁠[8][44][29][9][31]

His books include Elementary Particles and Weak Interactions, written with Chen Ning Yang, Particle Physics and Introduction to Field Theory (1981) and Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles.⁠[5][14]

T. D. Lee: Selected Papers, edited by Gerald Feinberg, was published in three volumes by Birkhäuser in 1986, and Thirty Years Since Parity Nonconservation: A Symposium for T. D. Lee, edited by Robert Novick, appeared in 1988. His collected scientific papers run to some 2,400 pages.⁠[4][5][13]

In 2000 he edited the large-format album Science and Art.⁠[3][14]

The Niels Bohr Library & Archives of the American Institute of Physics holds an oral history interview recorded with him on October 31, 1980. The Physics History Network record also lists “Reminiscences of Tsung-dao Lee,” an oral history of 1964 held by the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, and a 1956 manuscript by Chen Ning Yang and him, “Is parity conserved in weak interactions?”, held by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.⁠[5]

From 1987 he invited Chinese painters, among them Li Keran, Wu Zuoren, Huang Zhou and Wu Guanzhong, to create paintings on the themes of the international conferences held by CCAST. In 1993 he and Huang Zhou jointly chaired the first seminar on science and art.⁠[8][3]

He also drew and made sculptures himself and left several hundred sketches. In 2001 a sculpture based on his concept was shown at an international exhibition of art and science at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; it became the emblematic sculpture of the Institute of High Energy Physics. The chronology of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library gives the sculpture a name that means roughly “the way of things.” In the Physics World obituary Robert Crease says that he “was artistic too – he made many sculptures – and was funny.” An article in The Paper mentions that for several years running some teachers and students of Shanghai Jiao Tong University received New Year cards that he had painted himself.⁠[8][3][14][40]

After the death of Chien-Shiung Wu he designed the memorial site where her ashes rest. According to the National Academy of Sciences memoir, her ashes were taken to China to rest at the Ming De School.⁠[16]

In 2013 he endowed the T. D. Lee Science and Art Lecture Fund at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which held eleven series of events from 2014 to 2024.⁠[36][40]

His grave in Suzhou has five reliefs on the theme of science and art. Liu Huaizu helped arrange the grave and the reliefs.⁠[37]

His awards and decorations included the G. Bude Medal of the Collège de France (1969 and 1977), the Galileo Galilei Medal (1979), Italy’s Order of Merit, Grande Ufficiale (1986), the Science for Peace Prize (1994), the Matteucci Medal (1995), the China National-International Cooperation Award (1995), the New York City Science Award (1997), the Friendship Award of the Chinese government (1999), the New York Academy of Sciences Award (2000) and Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star (2007). The honors list of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library also includes the Erice Prize (1987), a Pope Paul medal and a medal of the Italian prime minister (both 1999), recognition as one of the most influential overseas experts in China in the thirty years of reform and opening (2009) and as one of the Chinese cultural figures of 2015 (2015); its list of other honors includes a science medal from Taiwan (1957), a professional achievement award of the 46th annual meeting of the Chinese Institute of Engineers in New York (1958), an award for outstanding contributions to education from an Asian American higher-education council (1993), an award for outstanding achievement from a national Chinese American association (1998), a contribution award of Brookhaven National Laboratory (1999) and an award for outstanding scientific and technological achievement of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2004), and it lists his directorship of the Beijing Institute of Modern Physics under 1999. The library’s chronology records that in 1982 the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa gave him its award for outstanding achievement in physics, the first such award in the nearly 200 years since Napoleon BonaparteNapoleon BonaparteNapoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and statesman who was first consul of the French Republic from 1799 to 1804 and emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and again in 1815. In 1803 he sold the Louisiana territory to the United States, and in 1804 he promulgated the French Civil Code.Open the full entry founded the school.⁠[12][19][14][39][41][3]

Besides the learned societies already mentioned, he was an academician of Academia Sinica (1957), a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1982), and a member of The World Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences; in 1994 he was elected to the first group of foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The honors list of the Tsung-Dao Lee Library also has membership of the American Philosophical Society (1962) and of the Italian National Academy of Sciences (1996); The Paper’s obituary of August 5, 2024, also lists the Italian National Academy of Sciences among his academies, and the English biography of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute names it as the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze.⁠[10][1][39][41][19]

He received honorary doctorates from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry (1958), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1969), the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1982), Bard College (1984), Peking University (1985), Drexel University (1986), the University of Bologna (1988), Columbia University (1990), Adelphi University (1991), the University of Tsukuba (1992), Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller University is a biomedical research university on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City, devoted mainly to scientific research and graduate education; it grew out of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research founded by John D. Rockefeller.Open the full entry (1994), National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan (1997) and the University of NottinghamUniversity of NottinghamThe University of Nottingham is a university based in Nottingham, England, United Kingdom. Its predecessor, University College, Nottingham, opened in 1881, and it became a university under a royal charter in 1948. It has overseas campuses in Malaysia and in Ningbo, China, and is a founding member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry (2006).⁠[19]

Chinese universities that named him an honorary professor included Fudan University (1982), Tsinghua University (1984), Nanjing University and Nankai University (both 1985) and Soochow University (1987). The same list also has a university given as Washington University (1971), without saying which one, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (1987) and National Taiwan Normal University (2007). The article in Fudan, the Fudan University newspaper, relates that at his appointment in 1982 the former president Su Buqing presented him with the letter of appointment and the school badge, and that in his address he said, in words that translate as, “From now on Fudan is my alma mater.”⁠[19][30]

On May 30, 1997, the Minor Planet Center and the minor-planet naming committee approved the naming of minor planet 3443, discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory, as 3443 Leetsungdao in his honor.⁠[3][6]

Brookhaven National Laboratory counts his Nobel Prize as the first of seven awarded for discoveries made at the laboratory.⁠[15]

J. Robert Oppenheimer called him one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the time, whose work showed “a remarkable freshness, versatility and style.”⁠[13][2]

After his death Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, judged that his contributions had left a lasting impact on both theoretical and experimental physics; at his retirement William Zajc, chair of the physics department, held that it was impossible to overstate his influence on the department. Minouche Shafik also called him “a beloved teacher and colleague for whom generations of Columbians will always be grateful.” The memorial article of Columbia University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adds that he “helped usher in a new era of international collaboration in scientific research and education” between the United States and China and helped establish “the first undergraduate school for gifted youth and the first postdoctoral educational program in China.”⁠[42][13][14]

JoAnne Hewett, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, called him a “once-in-a-generation theoretical physicist” and regarded his work with Chen Ning Yang as the foundation of the theory of weak interactions and of today’s Standard Model. She also said: “I served on panels with T.D. and was always in awe of his presence.” Hong Ma, chair of the laboratory’s Physics Department, said that “T.D. was revered as a great mentor for generations of physicists who followed his footsteps” and that “He helped to bridge the gap between east and west and fostered collaboration and understanding across culture boundaries.” Abhay Deshpande, the laboratory’s interim associate director for nuclear and particle physics and an early RBRC fellow, recalled “his genuine interest in talking to and encouraging us as we started on our research and academic careers”; Peter Bond, a retired physicist whose posts at the laboratory included interim director, credited “his creative view of how the RIKEN-BNL Research Center should operate” with a vital role in building up a community of talented young researchers, the center having no permanent positions but instead recruiting and developing talent.⁠[15]

Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recalled that without him the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider might never have been built, might have been long delayed, or might have had serious problems of quality.⁠[28]

The memorial article of the Shanghai institute of the University of Science and Technology of China held that the three undertakings in which he was involved, CUSPEA, high-energy physics and the Special Class for the Gifted Young, are each of particular importance in the history of physics in China. The same article held that describing the founding of the Special Class for the Gifted Young as an achievement of his vigorous advocacy, and reading his proposal as a proposal to found the class, in fact understated his deeper concern for the development of physics in China.⁠[31]

He described Chien-Shiung Wu as “one of the giants of physics” and held that in the field of beta decay she had no equal. An article in The Paper of 2022 on her also quotes him as saying that the final push in resolving the question of the breaking of symmetry came almost entirely from experiment.⁠[16][17]

The Tsung-Dao Lee Scholarship that he set up in Suzhou in 1985 rewarded the city’s top-scoring secondary-school graduates in the national university entrance examination until it ended in 2015; over 30 years, 202 students from 29 schools received it. In 1985 he also proposed a Tsung-Dao Lee Physics Scholarship at Fudan University, which was first awarded in 1986. The scholarship went to the top three candidates in the sciences and the top three in the humanities. An article in The Paper adds that from the 1980s he returned at least seven times to Soochow University to lecture and advise, and that on a visit with his wife on National Day 1986 he wrote an inscription for its laser laboratory that translates roughly as “Lasers add brilliance; Suzhou gains color.” The article in Fudan, the Fudan University newspaper, adds that at the first award ceremony in 1986 he presented the scholarships to the eight winners himself; that in 1993 he and his wife came to Shanghai to unveil the plaque of the university’s T. D. Lee comprehensive physics laboratory; that at Fudan University’s 90th anniversary in 1995 he gave a lecture whose title translates as “Learning and Asking” and became honorary chairman of the university’s first board of trustees; that in 1999 he attended a symposium of Chun-Tsung scholars at the university and wrote out a phrase that translates as “Chun-Tsung bamboo,” expressing his longing for his wife Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin; that in April 2014 the former president Yang Fujia and seven Chun-Tsung scholars of the university, among others, visited him at Columbia University; and that in 2018, for the 20th anniversary of the Chun-Tsung Endowment, when teachers and students of the university compiled an album whose title translates as “Tsung-Dao Lee and Fudan,” he practiced the inscription several times on blank paper before writing on its title page words that translate roughly as “The Chun-Tsung spirit, dawn after dawn.”⁠[29][30]

On November 22, 2025, a conference marking the centenary of his birth was held at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, organized by Shanghai Jiao Tong University together with the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Zhejiang University, the University of Science and Technology of China and the Chinese Physical Society.⁠[48]

Liu Huaizu, a former deputy director of the General Office of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, first had dealings with him in 1978 and from about 1984 helped him with his affairs in China, including coordination during the building of the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider, CUSPEA admissions and the running of CCAST; he asked to step down in 2006 and formally left in mid-2007. The note on the author of Liu Huaizu’s article in the journal Xiandai Wuli Zhishi (Modern Physics) lists him as a former head of the capital construction division of the Institute of High Energy Physics, director of the office of the leading group for the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider and secretary-general of CCAST; the article says that he directed the groundbreaking ceremony of 1984 on site and that Tsung-Dao Lee kept in direct and close contact with him, with several faxes a week or more at the time. Interviewed by The Paper in August 2024 at the age of 84, Liu Huaizu said that he spoke good Shanghainese and that Liu Huaizu sometimes talked with him in it; that each of his visits to China lasted a little over half a month, with Liu Huaizu accompanying him throughout; that whenever he came to Beijing he would, after a banquet, keep Liu Huaizu talking about everything under the sun until the small hours; that he liked red wine and sometimes drank until after one in the morning; and that he was fond of the dishes of a top-grade chef at a Beijing restaurant and once, when the chef, by then a friend, was visiting the United States, invited him home and cooked him what the interview calls Lee-style Western food.⁠[37][34]

Liu Huaizu describes him as full of energy, modest and unassuming, and warm toward young people; at 80, in a dialogue with students at Soochow University, he urged that to study is to learn to ask questions.⁠[37]

In the Physics World obituary Robert Crease calls him “a mentor to many people at Brookhaven” and recalls being asked by him to sign a copy of the autobiography, which Crease had edited, of the theorist Robert Serber, who in Crease’s words “had adored him.”⁠[14]

At both memorial gatherings of August 2024 his elder son Li Zhongqing called him a generous and loving father; at the meeting of August 25 he said that his father had taught him to explore knowledge and pursue truth, to concentrate on his work, to be modest, responsible and upright, to keep a sense of national pride, to appreciate art, to value family and friendship, and to strive to accomplish something rather than to chase money, material things and empty fame.⁠[47][44]

University of Chicago: Official website: https://www.uchicago.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[49]

University of California, Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[50]

Institute for Advanced Study: Official website: https://www.ias.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[51]

Columbia University: Official website: https://www.columbia.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[52]

National Academy of Sciences: Official website: https://www.nasonline.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[53]

China Center of Advanced Science and Technology: Official website: https://ccast.ac.cn/index (opens in a new window).⁠[54]

Chinese Academy of Sciences: Official website: https://english.cas.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[55]

Brookhaven National Laboratory: Official website: https://www.bnl.gov/about/ (opens in a new window).⁠[56]

Tsung-Dao Lee Institute: Official website: https://tdli.sjtu.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[57]

Tsung Dao (T.D.) Lee Library: Official website: https://tdllib.sjtu.edu.cn/index/index.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[58]