Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel Prize winner, died at 103 of illness in Beijing on October 18, state news outlet Xinhua said on Saturday.

Born in eastern China’s Hefei in Anhui province in 1922, Chen was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics.

Chen shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for physics with Tsung-Dao Lee.