Yoichiro nambu autobiography format

Abstract

Yoichiro Nambu was Harry Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago (1991-2015). Other institutional affiliations included the Institute for Advanced Study and Osaka City University. During his career he made many important contributions to theoretical physics, including spontaneous symmetry breaking, color gauging, and string theory.

Important Dates

January 18, 1921Birth, Tokyo (Japan).

1942Obtained MS, Imperial University of Tokyo, Tokyo (Japan).

1950 – 1956Assistant Professor to Professor, Osaka City University, Osaka (Japan).

1952Obtained DSc in Physics, Universtiy of Tokyo, Tokyo (Japan).

1952 – 1954Member, Institute for Advanced Study.

1954 – 2015Research Associate (1954-1956); Associate Professor of Physics (1956-1958); Professor of Physics (1958-1971); Distinguished Service Professor (1971-1976); Chair, Department of Physics (1974-1977); Harry Judson Distinguished Service Professor (1976-1991); and Harry Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus (1991-2015), University of Chicago, Chicago (Ill.).

1970Awarded Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, American Physical Society.

1973Member, National Academy of Sciences.

1982Awarded National Medal of Science.

1994Awarded Wolf Foundation Prize in Physics.

1994Awarded J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, American Physical Society.

2008Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".

July 5, 2015Death, Osaka (Japan).

Occupation

Theoretical particle physicist.

Places

Birth

Tokyo (Japan)

Graduate Education

Tokyo (Japan)

Employment

Osaka (Japan)

Chicago (Ill.)

Death

Osaka

Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the February 1995 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes in Scientific American.

I first saw Yoichiro Nambu almost 10 years ago, from the back row of a graduate seminar in physics at the University of Chicago. A small man in a neat suit, he was sketching long, snaking tubes on the blackboard. Sometimes he said they were vortex lines, found in superconductors; other times he called them strings, connecting quarks. Mystified, and yet fascinated by a bridge between such disparate realms, I later asked him to be my thesis adviser.

Face to face, Nambu was still hard to understand. I was clearly not the first to try. Bruno Zumino of the University of California at Berkeley once recounted his own attempts: "I had the idea that if I can find out what Nambu is thinking about now, I'll be 10 years ahead in the game. So I talked to him for a long time. But by the time I fi- gured out what he said, 10 years had passed." Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., explains: "People don't understand him, because he is so farsighted."

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Nambu was the first to see that when a physical system such as a superconductor --or an ocean of quarks--defies the symmetry imposed by physical laws, a new particle is born. Along with Moo-Young Han, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, he proposed the existence of gluons, the objects that hold quarks together. He also realized that quarks act as if they are connected by strings, an idea that became the foundation of string theory. "Over the years," remarks Murray Gell- Mann of the Santa Fe