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.

Lee remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the science fields after World War II.

His father Chun-kang Lee (李駿康; Lǐ Jùn-kāng), one of the first graduates of the University of Nanking, was a chemical industrialist and merchant who was involved in China's early development of modern synthesized fertilizer.

Due to the Second Sino-Japanese war, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he did not obtain his secondary diploma.

[5][additional citation(s) needed] However, again disrupted by a further Japanese invasion, Lee continued at the National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming the next year in 1945, where he studied with Professor Wu Ta-You.

[5] Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in the United States.

Lee received his PhD under Fermi in 1950 for his research work Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars.

After the definitive experimental confirmation by Chien-Shiung Wu and her assistants that showed that parity was not conserved, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.

[citation needed] Besides particle physics, Lee was active in statistical mechanics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, and lattice QCD.

"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations.