Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang, the Samuel A. Goudsmit Visiting Professor at the U-M, will give the first Ta-You Wu Lecture in Physics at 4 p.m. Tuesday (Nov. 3) in Rackham Amphitheater.
Yang, the Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, will discuss “Considerations on Carbon 60: Supermolecules, Superstructures and Superconductivity.”
He will lecture on “Reflections on the Development of Physics” at the Samuel A. Goudsmit Lecture in Physics at 3 p.m. today (Nov. 2) in the Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Engineering Building.
Yang was a student of Ta-You Wu at the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, China, during the 1940s. Yang’s contributions to physics include work on the non-abelian gauge theory with Robert Mills (1954); demonstration with T.D. Lee (1956) of the possibility of parity non-conservation in weak interactions for which they received the Nobel Prize; and development of the statistical model (1967), which has become known as the Yang-Baxter equation.
The Ta-You Wu Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through gifts from the U-M Alumni Association in Taiwan. Wu, who was born in Canton, China, received his doctorate from the U-M in 1933, under the direction of Samuel A. Goudsmit. Wu’s early work on heavy elements pointed to the existence of transuranium atoms.
Wu is the author of 21 books, including a seven-part series on theoretical physics and seven volumes of collected essays.
