Yoichiro Nambu
Award Name : National Medal of Science
Year of Award : 1982
Award for : Physics
Location : Tokyo, Tōkyō, Japan
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-born American physicist, a professor at the University of Chicago. Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1921. He received his Bachelor of Science in 1942 and Doctorate of Science in 1952. In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor at the Osaka City University. In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and was promoted to professor in 1958. From 1974 to 1977 he was also Chairman of the Department of Physics. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. Nambu had won numerous honors and awards including the Dannie Heineman Prize (1970), the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1977), Japan's Order of Culture (1978), the U.S.'s National Medal of Science (1982), the Max Planck Medal (1985), the Dirac Prize (1986), the Sakurai Prize (1994), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1994/1995), and the Franklin Institute's Benjamin Franklin Medal (2005). He was awarded one-half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".