Yoichiro Nambu

Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He was known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, especially in the areas of spontaneous symmetry breaking, quantum chromodynamics, and string theory. He was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, which explained why matter is much more common in the universe than antimatter and how elementary particles acquire mass. He also shared the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1995 and the National Medal of Science in 1982, among other honors. He was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Japan Academy. He was born in Tokyo in 1921 and graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1942. He worked as a radar researcher during World War II and returned to the University of Tokyo as a research associate after the war. He received his doctorate in 1952 and became a professor at Osaka City University in 1950. He moved to the US in 1952 and joined the University of Chicago in 1954, where he spent the rest of his career. He became a US citizen in 1970. He married Chieko Hida in 1945 and had a son, Jun-ichi. He died of a heart attack in Osaka, Japan, in 2015 at the age of 94.