Yoichiro Nambu

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Yoichiro Nambu : biography

January 18, 1921 –

Early years

Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1921. After graduating from the then Fukui Secondary High School in Fukui City, he enrolled in the Tokyo Imperial University and studied physics. He received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in 1952. In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor at the Osaka City University and promoted to professorship the next year at the age of 29.

In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and was promoted to professor in 1958. From 1974 to 1977 he was also Chairman of the Department of Physics. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.

Career in physics

Nambu is famous for having proposed the "color charge" of quantum chromodynamics, for having done early work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics, and for having discovered that the dual resonance model could be explained as a quantum mechanical theory of strings. He is accounted as one of the founders of string theory.

After more than 50 years as a professor, he is now Henry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago’s Department of Physics and Enrico Fermi Institute.

The Nambu-Goto action in string theory is named after Nambu and Tetsuo Goto. Also, massless bosons arising in field theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking are sometimes referred to as Nambu-Goldstone bosons.Y. Nambu and G. Jona-Lasinio, Phys. Rev. 122, 345-358 (1961) Y. Nambu and G. Jona-Lasinio, Phys. Rev.124, 246-254 (1961)

Honors and awards

Nambu has won numerous honors and awards including the Dannie Heineman Prize (1970), the J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize (1977), Japan’s Order of Culture (1978), the U.S.’s National Medal of Science (1982), the Max Planck Medal (1985), the Dirac Prize (1986), the Sakurai Prize (1994), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1994/1995), and the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal (2005). He was awarded one-half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".