Xi sends birthday greetings to Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel prize-winning physicist and also an initiator of the Xplorer Prize, speaks during the 2019 Xplorer Prize award ceremony in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 2, 2019. (Xinhua/Shen Bohan)

BEIJING, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent best wishes to renowned physicist Chen Ning Yang on his birthday.

Entrusted by Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, senior officials of the Ministry of Education visited Yang at Tsinghua University on Wednesday, presented him with a flower basket on Xi's behalf and conveyed Xi's greetings.

Yang is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Yang was born in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, on Sept. 22, 1922. In 1957, Yang shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-Dao Lee for work on the so-called parity laws, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles. The Yang-Mills gauge theory introduced by him is one of the most important achievements of physics in the 20th century.

After returning to China, Yang started working at Tsinghua University in 2003 and has made important contributions to cultivating and recruiting talent and promoting international academic exchanges.