Ceremony held to pay final respects to late Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang

BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- A ceremony was held in Beijing on Friday to pay final respects to late physicist Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel laureate, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor with Tsinghua University.

The farewell ceremony started at around 9 a.m. at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

Guests, including Yang's family and friends, representatives from Tsinghua University, and people from various sectors of society, gathered to pay their final respects to Yang.

Yang died in Beijing on Oct. 18 at 103.

He was born in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, in 1922. In the 1940s, he went to the United States to pursue academic studies and subsequently held teaching positions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957.

The Yang-Mills gauge theory introduced by Yang and Robert Mills is one of the most important achievements of physics in the 20th century.

Over more than 20 years since he returned to China, Yang had taught at Tsinghua University, making important contributions to cultivating and recruiting talent and promoting international academic exchanges.