Biography

Family

Tsung Dao (T. D.) Lee's ancestral hometown is Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. T. D. was born in Shanghai.

Lee's father Chun-kang Lee (simplified Chinese: 李骏康; traditional Chinese: 李駿康; pinyin: Lǐ Jùn-kāng), one of the first graduates of the University of Nanking, was a chemical industrialist and merchant who was involved in China's early development of modern synthesized fertilizer. Lee's grandfather Chong-tan Lee (Chinese: 李仲覃; pinyin: Lǐ Zhòng-tán) was the first Chinese Methodist Episcopal senior pastor of St. John's Church in Suzhou (蘇州聖約翰堂).

Lee has four brothers and one sister. Educator Robert C.T. Lee is one of T. D.'s brothers. Lee's mother Chang and brother Robert C. T. moved to Taiwan in the 1950s. They were accidentally jailed in Taiwan during the White Terror.

Early life

Lee received his secondary education in Shanghai, Suzhou (High School Affiliated to Soochow University, 东吴大学附属中学) and Jiangxi (Jiangxi Joint High School, 江西联合中学). Due to the Second Sino-Japanese war, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he did not obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly applied and was admitted by the National Che Kiang University (now Zhejiang University). Initially, Lee registered as a student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Very quickly, Lee's talent was discovered and his interest in physics grew rapidly. Several physics professors, including Shu Xingbei and Kan-Chang Wang, largely guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics of National Che Kiang University, where he studied in 1943-1944.

However, again disrupted by a further Japanese invasion, Lee continued at the National Southwestern Associated University (國立西南聯合大學) in Kunming the next year in 1945, where he studied with Professor Ta-You Wu.

Life and research in USA

Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in USA. In 1946, Lee went to the University of Chicago and was selected by Professor Enrico Fermi to become his PhD student. Lee completed his PhD thesis under Fermi in 1950. Lee served as research associate and lecturer in physics at the University of California at Berkeley from 1950 to 1951.

In 1953, Lee joined Columbia University, where he remained until retirement. His first work at Columbia was on a solvable model of quantum field theory better known as the Lee Model. Soon, his focus turned to particle physics and the developing puzzle of K meson decays. Lee realized in early 1956 that the key to the puzzle was parity non-conservation. At Lee's suggestion, the first experimental test was on hyperion decay by the Steinberger group. At that time, the experimental result gave only an indication of a 2 standard deviation effect of possible parity violation. Encouraged by this feasibility study, Lee made a systematic study of possible P,T,C and CP violations in weak interactions with collaborators, including C. N. Yang. After the definitive experimental confirmation by C.S. Wu and her collaborators of parity non-conservation, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics.

In the early 1960s, Lee and collaborators initiated the important field of high energy neutrino physics. In 1964, Lee, with M. Nauenberg, analyzed the divergences connected with particles of zero rest mass, and described a general method known as the KLN theorem for dealing with these divergences, which still plays an important role in contemporary work in QCD, with its massless, self-interacting gluons. In 1974-75, Lee published several papers on "A New Form of Matter in High Density", which led to the modern field of RHIC physics, now dominating the entire high energy nuclear physics field.

Besides particle physics, Lee has been active in statistical mechanics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, lattice QCD. In 1983, Lee wrote a paper entitled, "Can Time Be a Discrete Dynamical Variable?"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations. Beginning in 1975, Lee and collaborators established the field of non-topological solitons, which led to his work on soliton stars and black holes throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

From 1997 to 2003 Lee was director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (now director emeritus), which together with other researchers from Columbia, completed a 1 teraflops supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD in 1998 and a 10 teraflops QCDOC machine in 2001. Most recently, Lee and R. Friedberg have developed a new method to solve the Schrödinger Equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other instanton problems. They have also done work on the neutrino mapping matrix.

Educational activities

Soon after the re-establishment of China-American relations with the PRC, Lee and his wife, Hui-Chun Jeannette Chin (Chinese: 秦惠䇹; pinyin: Qín Huìjūn), were able to go to China, where Lee gave a series of lectures and seminars, and organized the CUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application).

In 1998, Lee established the Chun-Tsung Endowment (秦惠䇹—李政道中国大学生见习基金) in memory of his wife, Hui-Chun Chin, who died 3 years earlier. The Chun-Tsung scholarships, supervised by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (New York), are awarded to undergraduates, usually in their 2nd or 3rd year, at five universities, which are Fudan University, Lanzhou University, Soochow University, Peking University and Taiwan National Tsing Hua University. Students selected for such scholarships are named "Chun-Tsung Scholars" (䇹政学者).

Personal life

Chin and Lee were married in 1950 and have two sons: James and Stephen. Lee reads whodunit novels when not working on physics. The English spelling of his given name, "Tsung-Dao", differs dramatically from the Chinese Romanization systems in use at the time of his childhood, Wade-Giles and Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Tsung-Dao Lee's publications are all under the name of T.D. Lee.

Honours and awards

Awards:

• Nobel Prize in Physics (1957)
• G. Bude Medal, Collège de France (1969, 1977)
• Galileo Galilei Medal (1979)
• Order of Merit, Grande Ufficiale, Italy (1986)
• Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture and Medal (1993)
• Science for Peace Prize (1994)
• China National-International Cooperation Award (1995)
• Matteucci Medal (1995)
• Naming of Small Planet 3443 as the 3443 Leetsungdao (1997)
• New York City Science Award (1997)
• Pope Joannes Paulus Medal (1999)
• Ministero dell'Interno Medal of the Government of Italy (1999)
• New York Academy of Science Award (2000)
• The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, Japan (2007)

Memberships:

• National Academy of Sciences
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• American Philosophical Society
• Academia Sinica
• Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
• Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Third World Academy of Sciences
• Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Bibliography

Technical Reports:

• "Conservation Laws in Weak Interactions," Columbia University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (March 1957).
• "Weak Interactions," Columbia University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (June 1957).
• (with C.N. Yang) "Elementary Particles and Weak Interactions," Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (October 1957).
• "History of Weak Interactions," Columbia University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), July 1970).
• "Energy Electromagnetic and Weak Interaction Processes," Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), January 11, 1972).

Books:

• Lee, T.D. (1981). Particle Physics and Introduction to Field Theory. Newark: Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 3-7186-0032-3.
• Lee, T.D.; Feinberg, G. (1986). Selected Papers, Vols 13. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN 0-8176-3344-8.
• Lee, T.D. (1988). Ed. R. Novick: Thirty Year's Since Parity Nonconservation. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN 0-8176-3375-8.
• Lee, T.D. (1988). Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-96519-3.
• Lee, T.D.; Ren, H. C.; Pang, Y. (1998). Selected Papers, 1985-1996. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. ISBN 90-5699-609-6.
• Lee, T.D. (2000). Science and Art. Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publisher. ISBN 7-5323-5609-4.
• Lee, T.D. (2002). The Challenge from Physics. Beijing: China Economics Publisher. ISBN 7-5017-5622-8.
• Lee, T.D.; Cheng, Ji; Huaizu, Liu; Li, Teng (2004). Response to the Dispute of Discovery of Parity Violation (in Chinese). Lanzhou, Gansu: Gansu Science and Technology Publishing House. ISBN 7-5424-0929-8.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]