PHYSICISTS from China

Top 7

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Chinese Physicists of all time. This list of famous Chinese Physicists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Walter Houser Brattain (1902 - 1987)

With an HPI of 68.10, Walter Houser Brattain is the most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 74 different languages on wikipedia.

Walter Houser Brattain (; February 10, 1902 – October 13, 1987) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states.

2. Yang Chen-Ning (b. 1922)

With an HPI of 65.73, Yang Chen-Ning is the 2nd most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 76 different languages.

Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng; born 1 October 1922), also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that the conservation of parity, a physical law observed to hold in all other physical processes, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles. Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the Yang–Mills theory.

3. Tsung-Dao Lee (1926 - 2024)

With an HPI of 65.44, Tsung-Dao Lee is the 3rd most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 71 different languages.

Tsung-Dao Lee (Chinese: 李政道; pinyin: Lǐ Zhèngdào; November 24, 1926 – August 4, 2024) was a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee–Yang theorem, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons, and soliton stars. He was a university professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York City, where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 2012. In 1957, at the age of 30, Lee won the Nobel Prize in Physics with Chen Ning Yang for their work on the violation of the parity law in weak interactions, which Chien-Shiung Wu experimentally proved from 1956 to 1957, with her well known Wu experiment. Lee remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the science fields after World War II. He is the third-youngest Nobel laureate in sciences in history after William L. Bragg (who won the prize at 25 with his father William H. Bragg in 1915) and Werner Heisenberg (who won in 1932 also at 30). Lee and Yang were the first Chinese laureates. Since he became a naturalized American citizen in 1962, Lee is also the youngest American ever to have won a Nobel Prize.

4. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 - 1997)

With an HPI of 63.63, Chien-Shiung Wu is the 4th most famous Chinese Physicist.  Her biography has been translated into 53 different languages.

Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxióng; Wade–Giles: Wu2 Chien4-shiung2; May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".

5. Qian Xuesen (1911 - 2009)

With an HPI of 60.46, Qian Xuesen is the 5th most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.

Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森; December 11, 1911 – October 31, 2009; also spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. He achieved recognition as one of America's leading experts in rockets and high-speed flight theory prior to his returning to China in 1955. Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934. He traveled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the California Institute of Technology in 1936, received a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics there in 1939, and became an associate professor at Caltech in 1943. While at Caltech, he co-founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was recruited by the United States Department of Defense and the Department of War to serve in various positions, including as an expert consultant with a rank of colonel in 1945. At the same time, he became an associate professor at MIT in 1946, a full professor at MIT in 1947, and a full professor at Caltech in 1949. During the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, the United States federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues and without any evidence of the allegations, he was stripped of his security clearance. He was given a deferred deportation order by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in mainland China via Hong Kong. Upon his return, he helped lead development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. He also played a significant part in the construction and development of China's defense industry, higher education and research system, rocket force, and a key technology university. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite. In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998. He was the cousin of engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of both China and the United States. His nephew, Roger Y. Tsien, was the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

6. Daniel C. Tsui (b. 1939)

With an HPI of 58.94, Daniel C. Tsui is the 6th most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 61 different languages.

Daniel Chee Tsui (Chinese: 崔琦; pinyin: Cuī Qí, born February 28, 1939) is an American physicist. He is currently serving as the Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, at Princeton University. Tsui's areas of research include electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics. Tsui won the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1998 with Robert B. Laughlin and Horst L. Störmer "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations."

7. He Jiankui (b. 1984)

With an HPI of 37.68, He Jiankui is the 7th most famous Chinese Physicist.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

He Jiankui ([xɤ̂ tɕjɛ̂nkʰwěɪ]; 贺建奎; born 1984) is a Chinese biophysicist. He was named as the inaugural director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Wuchang Technical College, a private undergraduate college in Wuhan, in September 2023. Before January 2019, He served as associate professor at the Department of Biology of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Earning a PhD from Rice University in Texas on protein evolution, including that of CRISPR, He learned gene-editing techniques (CRISPR/Cas9) as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in California. In November 2018, He announced that he had created the first human genetically edited babies, twin girls who were born in mid-October 2018 and known by their pseudonyms, Lulu and Nana. The announcement was initially praised in the press as a major scientific advancement. But following scrutiny on how the experiment was executed, He received widespread condemnation. His research activities were suspended by the Chinese authorities on 29 November 2018, and he was fired by SUSTech on 21 January 2019. On 30 December 2019, a Chinese district court found He Jiankui guilty of illegal practice of medicine, sentencing him to three years in prison with a fine of 3 million yuan. He was released from prison in April 2022. He was listed as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2019, in the section "Pioneers". At the same time he was variously referred to as a "rogue scientist", "China's Dr. Frankenstein", and a "mad genius".