When Professor C.N. Yang remarried a few years ago, we noticed one striking difference in the newspaper articles between China and the USA. Many papers in China did not even bother to include what he had done that made him famous enough to merit an article. In China he is so well known his name alone said it all!

Every American paper included his Nobel information because if they had not, the general public would have been clueless.

That is why in China only two people are in the science section of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum - Albert Einstein, the world's greatest physicist, and C.N. Yang, China's greatest physicist.

And what does that have to do with Stony Brook? Prof. Yang won his Nobel in 1957 after getting his doctorate at the University of Chicago and then continuing his research at Princeton. Just nine years later, in 1966, he came to Stony Brook to hold the first Einstein Chair and to create the Institute for Theoretical Physics. When he retired in 1999, ITP was renamed in his honor.

C.N. Yang's thirty-three years at Stony Brook forever linked the two names together. Every student in China who took a physics class learned about C.N. Yang and where he was. Because of him, every educated person in China has heard the name 'Stony Brook' at least once. But not only did he raise SBU's prestige, he raised SUNY's. Until a few years ago, SBU was known as SUNY at Stony Brook. Many in China did not know SUNY meant multiple campuses. They thought it only meant Stony Brook.

No other person did more for Stony Brook's reputation than Chen Ning Yang.

And in more ways than people realize. Here is Professor Yang at Stony Brook teaching freshmen a different kind of physics...

http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/clubs/educasia/
StonyBrookStories/CNYang.html

This month, at the Stony Brook China Alumni - AIMP China V Shanghai Reunion, a lunchtime of gan bei's segued into a 'field trip' to Madame Tussaud's. While 40-50 year old CEO's and CIO's teased each other about where they were, every single one of them had their photo taken with the model of Dr. Yang. Not only had Yang Chen Ning been a real role model when they were growing up, they had been fortunate to meet with him while studying at Stony Brook.

And for that honor, they had the second man to thank... the next generation... the one who created AIMP and gave them the opportunity to go to Stony Brook in the days when an MBA in China barely existed.

And who is that second man?

by Ja Young, Alumni Editor, Shanghai Summer, 5 Sept 06