For his path-breaking contributions leading to our modern understanding of sub-atomic particles--the Standard Model. His work has revolutionized our ideas about the nature of the most fundamental particles and the space through which they move.
Yoichiro Nambu's long and distinguished career in physics has led to the concepts of broken symmetry and quark "color." He was also an early pioneer of string theory. Dr.Nambu received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in 1952, from the University of Tokyo. After serving as a professor at Osaka City University in Japan and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he began an extraordinary 50-year career at at The University of Chicago, where he has been an emeritus professor since his retirement in 1991.
Some of Dr.Nambu's many honors are Israel's Wolf Prize, the United States' National Medal of Science, Japan's Order of Culture, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics P.A.M. Dirac Medal, the German Physical Society's Max Planck Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize and Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research's Bogoliubov Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary member of the Japan Academy.
Information as of April 2005