Nambu, Yoichiro

Nambu, Yoichiro

(yoi`chērō näm`bo͞o), 1921–2015, Japanese-American physicist, b. Tokyo, D.Sc. Univ. of Tokyo, 1952. He studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, with Albert EinsteinEinstein, Albert
, 1879–1955, American theoretical physicist, known for the formulation of the relativity theory, b. Ulm, Germany. He is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of all time.
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 from 1952–54 and subsequently was a researcher and professor at the Univ. of Chicago, retiring in 1991. Nambu, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with Makoto KobayashiKobayashi, Makoto,
1944–, Japanese physicist, Ph.D. Kyoto Univ., 1972. Kobayashi taught at Kyoto Univ. (1972–79) and the National Laboratory of High Energy Physics, Tsukuba, Japan (1979–97).
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 and Toshihide MaskawaMaskawa, Toshihide,
1940–, Japanese physicist, Ph.D. Nagoya Univ., 1967. Maskawa was a research associate at Nagoya Univ. from 1967–70 and then joined the faculty at Kyoto Univ., where he was appointed emeritus professor in 2003.
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, received it for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, which he described in a mathematical model. Spontaneous broken symmetry hides nature's order under a surface that appears disorganized, and is a concept that underlies the standard model of elementary particle physics. The three physicists are credited with providing insights into what happens within the smallest building blocks of matter; Nambu's also work contributed to the prediction of the Higgs boson.