Tsung-Dao Lee

Who is Tsung-Dao Lee?

Tsung-Dao Lee is a Chinese-born American physicist, well known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars. He holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1953 and from which he retired in 2012.

In 1957, Lee, at the age of 30, won the Nobel Prize in Physics with C. N. Yang for their work on the violation of parity law in weak interaction, which Chien-Shiung Wu experimentally verified.

Lee is the youngest Nobel laureate after World War II, and the third youngest in history after W. L. Bragg and Werner Heisenberg. Lee and Yang were the first Chinese laureates. Since being naturalized as an American citizen in 1962, Lee thus is also the youngest American ever to have won a Nobel Prize.