[pessimist]

Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.

To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."

[MengerSponge]

The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot

[gsf_emergency_4]

The path from Lee-Yang to Yang-Mills is short (~months) but the shortness is instructive

(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).

See this comment which might seem completely throwaway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632370)

In the same vein, here is a short-note of Yang, readable to nonscientists, here:

https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X03017142

(He rebuts Dyson)

Necessary Subtlety and Unnecessary Subtlety

[gsf_emergency_4]

In order to explain his impact to people, someone could find a friendlier name for "gauge"?

Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*)

https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s

Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678

[MengerSponge]

> friendlier name for "gauge"?

Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?

It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!

[scotty79]

The word gauge is completely opaque to me, invokes no reasonable connotation.

I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.

[kurtis_reed]

How do you know he's underrated?

[tasuki]

I think it's so obviously a personal opinion it didn't need explicit mentioning.