http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/obituaries/23YUAN.htmlLuke Yuan, 90, Senior Physicist at Brookhaven, Is Dead
By ERIC PACE
Dr. Luke C. L. Yuan, an experimental physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a science educator and a benefactor of a Chinese museum honoring his wife, Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, a noted physicist, died on Feb. 11 in Beijing. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
Dr. Yuan had fallen ill more than a year ago while visiting relatives in China and was hospitalized, his granddaughter, Jada Yuan, said.
Luke Chia-Liu Yuan was born in a palace in Beijing. He was the grandson of Yuan Shikai, China's president from 1912 to 1916. He studied at Yenching University in Beijing and received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology.
He came to the United States in 1936 and worked mainly at Brookhaven, where he was a senior physicist. He was unable to revisit China until 1973, when he was invited, along with his wife. She and her colleagues had performed a historic experiment, announced in 1957, that overthrew a law of symmetry in physics, called the principle of conservation of parity, which had been considered incontrovertible for 30 years.
After retiring in 1979, Dr. Yuan helped found the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center in Taiwan, becoming its chairman. He also started the Wu-Yuan Natural Science Foundation, which sends visiting lecturers to Chinese universities.
Dr. Wu died in 1997, and he gave many of their belongings to what became the Chien-Shiung Wu Memorial Hall at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
Besides Jada Yuan, of Manhattan, he is survived by a son, Vincent, a nuclear physicist, of New Mexico; and a brother, Yuan Jiaji, who lives in Tianjin, China.
