NOBEL laureate Chen Ning Yang and Turing Award-winning computer scientist Andrew Chi-chih Yao have given up their foreign citizenship and become Chinese citizens, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced yesterday.

    They are the first overseas scientists to relinquish their foreign citizenship to join the official faculty of China’s highest scientific research organization. Yang, 95, will join the mathematical physics department, while Yao, 71, will enter the information technology and science department.

    “They are both internationally renowned scholars,” CAS said in a press statement. “Their entry into the academy’s faculty will increase the influence of China’s scientific circles globally.”

    Yang, born in 1922 in Hefei of East China’s Anhui Province, was a Chinese-American physicist who has worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 at the age of 35, with his colleague Tsung-dao Lee for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction, becoming the first two Chinese Nobel Prize winners.

    Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing a gauge theory of a new class. Such “Yang-Mills theories” are now a fundamental part of the Standard Model of particle physics.

    Yao, born in Shanghai in 1946, was a Chinese-American computer scientist and computational theorist. He received the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, in 2000, “in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity.”

    In late 2016, both scientists had relinquished their foreign nationality and submitted their request to join the academy. The faculty office had to implement new interim procedures to accept them.

    In recent years, the faculty office is actively trying to build a “big academician family,” connecting renowned scholars around the world to advise and contribute to China’s major scientific development. There are now 754 Chinese and 78 foreign scientists at the academy.

    Since 2014, the CAS has stipulated and revised regulations on the selection of academicians to improve the national think tank.

    (Xinhua)