€18.99 for a Marine Le Pen bobblehead to commemorate my girls weekend in Paris? No thanks. I have what I like to call a “souvenir of the mind” that is to say my indelible memory of a septuagenarian cradling a dead pigeon’s emaciated corpse on the OrlyVal
C.N. Yang has passed, age 103.
Yang was awarded the Nobel prize at 35, for parity violation (shared with T.D. Lee). But his greatest contribution was probably Yang-Mills theory, now referred to as gauge theory. When I was a student the former designation was as common as the latter.
Freeman Dyson called Yang "the pre-eminent stylist of 20th-century physics".
"Dr. Yang's sense of mathematical beauty turns his least important calculations into miniature works of art, and turns his deeper speculations into masterpieces."
Dyson believed only Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac exceeded Yang as stylists in physics.