Nobel-winning Chinese American physicist Tsung Dao Lee dies at 97

Tsung Dao Lee, who became the second youngest person to win a Nobel Prize in 1957 for overturning the law of conservation of parity, died on Sunday at 97 in San Francisco.

Lee, a Columbia University professor emeritus, correctly challenged the long-accepted physics theory that particles and their mirror images behave identically. Born in Shanghai in 1926, Lee studied physics under Enrico Fermi and had a distinguished career, contributing to theories on black holes and dark matter. He retired from Columbia in 2012 but continued to influence particle physics research into his 90s. Lee’s pioneering work earned him numerous accolades and left a lasting impact on the field of physics.