One: Zhang Shousheng, a world-famous physicist, has won many heavyweight awards in the field of physics in addition to the Nobel Prize. Zhang Shousheng was born in Shanghai in February 1963. In 1978, without attending high school, he was directly admitted to the Department of Physics of Fudan University. After graduation, he went to the Free University of Berlin in Germany to study for a master's degree, and then went to the State University of New York in the United States to pursue a doctorate, and the supervisor was Professor Yang Zhenning, a world physics giant.
In 1993, he was hired as a professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford University, and three years later, he was named a tenured professor; Elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011; In 2013, he was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Zhang Shousheng is mainly engaged in research in the field of condensed matter physics and has made extraordinary achievements. In 2007, Zhang Shousheng discovered the "quantum spin Hall effect", which was rated as one of the "Top Ten Important Scientific Breakthroughs in the World" by Science Magazine. In 2009, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he predicted three topological insulator materials that became a major advance in the field of materials physics.
Since 1992, Zhang Shousheng has received more than 10 awards and honors, the most important of which include: the Gutenberg Research Prize in 2010, the European Physics Prize in September 2010, the Oliver Barkley Prize in 2012, and the Dirac Prize (the highest award in the field of international theoretical physics) in August 2012. No one expected that this scientist, who stood at the top of the world's physics, committed suicide and died on December 6, 2018, which is a huge loss to the world's physics community.
Feng Xiqiao, born in Beijing in 1960, his father is a state-level chief engineer, and his mother is the director of thoracic surgery in the hospital. At the age of 17, he was admitted to the Physics Department of Peking University with excellent results. In his junior year, Feng Xiqiao took the Sino-US Institute of Physics examination and was admitted to Harvard University with the first and fourth in the country, when he was only 20 years old. At Harvard, Feng Xiqiao's light is still dazzling, winning the Outstanding Graduate Student of the Year Award, and his results have always been top-notch. During his time as a researcher in the United States, Feng Xiqiao once set a record of publishing more than 80 papers in 8 years. His research in the physics of condensed matter theory is often cited to this day.
Unfortunately, on September 16, 1996, the 34-year-old talented Feng Xiqiao committed suicide by jumping off a building in Paris, which shocked the American physics community at that time, and the American Physical Union published an obituary for Feng Xiqiao in its monthly magazine and made an exception to publish his photo. The University of California, Los Angeles lowered the flag to half-mast for a day to show his condolences.
Three: Wang Qinggen, born in 1972 in Hai'an County, Jiangsu Province. Born poor, but brilliant. In his sophomore year of high school, Wang Qinggen participated in the national physics competition, won the second prize in the Jiangsu Division, participated in the National Chemistry Competition, and won the first prize in the Jiangsu Division. In 1990, Wang Qinggen represented China and three other students to participate in the 22nd International Chemistry Olympiad for Secondary School Students in Paris, France, and won the gold medal, becoming the first Olympiad world champion in Jiangsu Province! In recognition of his achievements, the local Olympic Building was built, his hometown Deng Zhuang, and a placard was erected that read: Welcome to the people of Deng Zhuang, the hometown of international gold medal winner Wang Qinggen!
After that, Wang Qinggen, who was elected by the university, did not choose Peking University Tsinghua, but chose Nanjing University. After graduating from NTU, Wang Qinggen went to Stanford in the United States for further study. It was such a proud son of heaven from the countryside who suddenly committed suicide on April 6, 2012, leaving behind his wife and two children. Zhang Shousheng once wrote in his article on the relationship between science and faith: "Science really has eternal limitations, there are limitations that cannot be changed in the future, and science and faith not only have no contradictions today, but there will never be contradictions in the future." "Let us humans wonder, what is the end of science?