TinyChan

Dr. Lee had an exceptionally long and productive career. He retired from regular teaching at Columbia in 2012, at age 86, but continued to contribute ideas to particle physics research into his 90s. His name is affixed to two theorems, the Lee Model and the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem — and he developed important theories on black holes and dark matter.
He was also a prominent physicist in the field of relativistic heavy ion colliders, and from 1997 to 2003 he was the director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, which houses the laboratory’s collider.
In a 2007 interview with the Nobel Institute on the 50th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, Dr. Lee attributed part of his success, particularly his insight into parity nonconservation, to his nontraditional education.
Tsung-Dao Lee, who was often known as T.D., was born on Nov. 24, 1926, in Shanghai, the third of six children of Tsing-Kong Lee, a merchant with a background in working with chemicals, and Ming-Chang Chang. Dr. Lee said he grew up “in a family of learning.”
He was in high school when war broke out between China and Japan, forcing him to abandon his studies. It was during this time that he discovered physics. Stumbling across some science books, he was immediately intrigued, but as he was no longer receiving a formal education, he was left to teach himself. It helped him develop his own approach to solving problems.
In the 2007 interview, he recalled tackling Newton’s laws, particularly Newton’s famous equation of force equals mass times acceleration, based on what he could glean from the books.