Sad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.
~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.
The research competition is basically a funding competition nowadays. In the 20th century, China had far less research funding for universities compared to U.S.. That's due to two facts:
1. China was poor back then.
2. China had barely no high-tech industries which can provide additional financial support to labs and cultivate talents.
Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge.
In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.
To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th
century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the
sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact
analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound
and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian
gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields
is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular
discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot
There’s a fascinating story about S Chandrasekhar (of Chandrasekhar limit fame) driving 100 miles to teach him every week. Teaching two students, the professor got a Nobel prize and the two students got a Nobel prize.
“ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.”
In addition to the Yang Mills theory, parity nonconservation, phase transition theory, and the Yang Baxter equation, these are also among Yang Zhenning’s important theoretical achievements. Moreover, he has made numerous academic contributions in areas such as the integral formulation of gauge fields and cold atom research.
I was fortunate enough to take his Quantum Mechanics class when I was a student at SUNY, Stony Brook. He used to a drive a simple white Honda Accord that was 7+ years old.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning
RIP
Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%...
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
What did he have to say?
Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge.
In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.
He once "leaked" the idea that Jim Simon's trading success came from his use of ideas called "gauge theory" and "fibre bundles".
I forgot the exact timestamp, but you will have to watch the entire interview to find that segment — https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9710148
https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Finance-Modelling-Non-Equilib...
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*)
https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s
Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics.
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
#52 Symmetry in physical laws
Rest In Peace.
> Ning attended the prestegious Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
Yang-Mills theory for electro-magnetic force is grounded in integratable systems, a gauge theory in statistics, etc for elementary particles.
“ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.”
Source: https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml