The path from Lee-Yang to Yang-Mills is short (~months) but the shortness is instructive

(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).

See this comment which might seem completely throwaway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632370)

In the same vein, here is a short-note of Yang, readable to nonscientists, here:

https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X03017142

(He rebuts Dyson)

Necessary Subtlety and Unnecessary Subtlety

I think it's so obviously a personal opinion it didn't need explicit mentioning.

The word gauge is completely opaque to me, invokes no reasonable connotation.

I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.

> friendlier name for "gauge"?

Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?

It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!

AFAIK, one of the early hires at RenTech was Leonard Baum, famous for the Baum–Welch Algorithm.

RenTech is quite secretive, but this supports the rumors that simple graphical models for time series were behind some of their trading strategies.

Rentec is still world renowned after pioneering the quant business 40+ years ago. I don't think the rested on their laurels with some easy thing that they just stumbled on early

This reads like “Newton or Einstein were just early”. That’s the whole thing, being the first person to do it.

It was a long time ago but I remember Fermi decided that he (Yang) didn't do well at experimental physics, saying "where there's a Yang, there's a bang". My impression was that the atomic bomb wasn't a surprise, with the idea that when the ship arrived he'd enter a new world as a result. He was Oppenheimer's assistant at Princeton. I don't think I knew that at the time, so he must have told me but I don't recall any details. We also had a discussion about Maxwell but his later article on the subject is a much better source than my fading memory.

> 9 if you count people...

13 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_Nobel_laureate..., including peace prize laureates Liu Xiaobo (2010) and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989).

> But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded...

> The US has been invaded zero times...

The number of external invasions is not a strong indicator of the number of Nobel Prizes, if you compare all countries, beyond just China or the US.

And as you mentioned, the Cultural Revolution greatly reduces the chance of Chinese Nobel, so internal events can take a large role. And Mao led to more deaths—not to mention destruction to science and culture—than external invasions in the last century combined.

> The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships...

The dictatorship arguably hasn't ended, by taking another less brutal form. And to be precise, CCP brought the civil wars and its consequences, not the civil wars brought dictatorships.

> China has been invaded by ... Britain (largely India)

That is such an interesting characterization of the territorial disputes between PRC(and/or ROC) and RoI.

The War of 1812... when the British burned down the White House and the Capitol surely has to count as an "invasion".

I’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.

India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like China or the soviet union had.

I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up.

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The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented.

Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world.

The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think.

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There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one.

The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals.

This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers.

The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.

china is still not its peak yet. the tech boom only starts few years ago.