Source: https://www.guckinfuneralhome.com/obituaries/rosa-reyes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/science/rudolph-marcus-dead.html
Dylan Loeb McClain

Rudolph Marcus, a Canadian-born American chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a theory that helped explain the electrochemical processes behind photosynthesis, respiration, oxidation and even how fireflies produce light, died on Thursday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 102.

His death was announced by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he had taught since 1978. Sarah Reisman, the chair of the chemistry and chemical engineering division at Caltech, said that it was almost impossible to overstate the importance of Dr. Marcus’s work.

“It provides a simple theory for one of the most fundamental processes in chemistry and has been applied to understand reactions ranging from small-molecule catalysts to proteins involved in photosynthesis,” she wrote in an email.

Dr. Marcus was a theoretical chemist and not an experimentalist. He discovered early in his career that he did not like performing experiments, preferring to conceive explanations for mysterious phenomena, he explained in a 2016 podcast.

“It all comes back to the puzzles, I think, and the enjoyment of puzzles as a child,” he said, adding, “Only now the puzzles are scientific puzzles.”

The puzzle Dr. Marcus solved that led to his winning the Nobel in 1992 concerned electron transfer reactions — “the simplest” of all chemical reactions, he said because “there are no bonds that are broken or formed, just simply an electron is transferred from one reactant to another.”

He stumbled upon the subject in 1955 while teaching at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (which, after a merger, is now New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering). While leafing through magazines in the library, he read an article by the future Nobel laureate Willard Libby, that explained why some electron transfers occurred at faster speeds than others (and, to some degree, why they occurred at all).

Dr. Libby’s ideas were based on a phenomenon first observed in the 1920s, in which shining a light on atoms would give them enough energy to spontaneously emit electrons, a process so fast that the nuclei would not change positions. Dr. Libby suggested that the same thing happened in electron transfers.

Dr. Marcus thought that Dr. Libby’s idea of how electrons can be emitted without disturbing the nuclei was promising, except for one glaring problem: Where did the energy come from to support the emission? In the 1920s experiment, the source of that energy was light, in the form of photons. But what about reactions that happened in the dark? Almost immediately, Dr. Marcus thought of a way to solve the problem.

Electron transfers can occur between atoms that do not have the same number of electrons — for example, two different ions of iron. Dr. Libby had noted that immediately after an electron transfer, the new ions are in the “wrong environment” (as opposed to the one in which they started) and electrically disturb, or polarize, other atoms in the material around them. That gives the atoms potential energy.

Dr. Marcus thought that — if the potential energy of the ions and other atoms surrounding them was considered as a whole — as the potential energy increased because of the disturbances, a critical point would be reached at which potential energy would be converted to kinetic energy, making electron transfers possible. And the process could start again, feeding the cycle.

He worked out a formula with all the elements of the reaction, and the equation showed that the energy remains the same before, after and during the transfer, so energy is conserved, following physical laws. Over the next several years, he published papers that outlined the results of experiments that might be expected if his theory was correct.

Others did that work, and most of his predictions were quickly validated. One prediction — the most unusual of all — was that, as the electron transfers occurred, they would create more perturbations, and so they would happen faster and faster until, paradoxically, there would come a point at which the reactions would slow down. When plotted, the shape of the curve of these reactions was an inverted parabola, and Dr. Marcus called the area under the curve the “inverted region.”

In the 2016 Electrochemical Society interview, Dr. Marcus said the result was “unexpected, like falling down a cliff and you make it too steep and it’s harder to fall.” Demonstrating that phenomenon proved to be difficult; it was not until 1984 that an experiment by John R. Miller, Lidia T. Calcaterra and Gerhard L. Closs confirmed it, thus validating Dr. Marcus’s entire theory.

In the years since, the theory has been extended to other, more complicated transfers — like those across membranes in photosynthesis, in organic semiconductors and in chemiluminescence (“cold light”), which is the chemical form of bioluminescence found in fireflies — and proved to be just as applicable.

In addition to the Nobel, he received the Wolf Prize, considered to be the second most prestigious award in chemistry after the Nobel, in 1985 and the National Medal of Science in 1989.

Rudolph Arthur Marcus was born in Montreal on July 21, 1923. He was the only child of Myer Marcus, who worked in a grocery store, and Esther (Cohen) Marcus.

Throughout grade and high school, he excelled in math and science. At McGill University in Montreal, he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1943 and a doctorate in 1946. Afterward, he obtained a postdoctoral position at the National Research Council of Canada and later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working under the renowned chemist Oscar Knefler Rice.

As a postdoctoral student in Chapel Hill, Dr. Marcus began working on a theory that had been developed in the 1920s by Dr. Rice, Herman Carl Ramsperger and Louis Stevenson Kassel about reactions involving single molecules. Dr. Marcus was able to extend the RRK Theory, as it was known, to predict and interpret the rates of some types of important chemical reactions, publishing four papers on the topic in 1952. The reworked theory, which is widely used today in mass spectrometry to measure compounds and materials and in simulating combustion dynamics, is now called the RRKM Theory, honoring Dr. Marcus with an initial.

A week after he started at North Carolina, Dr. Marcus met Laura Hearne, a graduate student in sociology. They were married six months later. She died in 2003. Dr. Marcus is survived by their three sons, Alan, Kenneth and Raymond; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

After more than a decade teaching at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964 before joining Caltech. He continued to work until he fell ill earlier this year. His last jointly published paper appeared in the January issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Sgt. Paul Allen Gregg was born on 6 January 1915, and passed away back on 29 May 2025 at the age of 110, in Arcola, Illinois, USA.

https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/il/arcola/paul-gregg-21440536

Now the oldest is Germany's Günther Haase (Helsinki 1952; also diving, bronze) aged 100 years 261 days.

https://www.irishpost.com/news/sir-patrick-duffy-britains-oldest-living-former-mp-passes-away-at-the-age-of-105-302829

He was born on 2nd December 1919 in Oberstaufen i. Allgäu, Bavaria, Germany and emigrated in 1947 to the USA.

https://www.aspentimes.com/news/photos-aspen-skiing-legend-klaus-obermeyer-celebrates-106-years-young/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Obermeyer

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Obermeyer

A happy 106th birthday to you, Mr. Obermeyer!  Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag! 

RIP

Source

May he rest in peace.

The new titleholder is Gábor Benedek (b. 23 March 1927) of Hungary, who won gold and silver in the modern pentathlon at the 1952 Helsinki Games.

Charles Coste, ex-ciclista e decano mundial dos campeões olímpicos, morreu aos 101 anos (lemonde.fr)

The current longest-lived is now Rudolph Marcus, 102.

Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103

He and a colleague created a sensation in 1956 by proposing that one of the four forces of nature might violate a law of physics.

by George Johnson, New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/science/chen-ning-yang-dead.html

Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist whose feel for mathematical aesthetics helped reveal a surprising kink in the weave of nature, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 103. His death was announced by Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Dr. Yang taught for many years. Dr. Yang and a colleague, the physicist Tsung-Dao Lee created a sensation in 1956 by proposing that one of the four forces of nature might violate a seemingly ironclad principle called conservation of parity — a way of saying that a phenomenon and its mirror image should behave precisely the same. Their prediction was quickly borne out by experiment, and they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

When Dr. Yang retired from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1999, a colleague, the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson called him “the pre-eminent stylist” of 20th-century physics, exceeded only by Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac. Dr. Yang’s sense of mathematical beauty, Dr. Dyson said, “turns his least important calculations into miniature works of art, and turns his deeper speculations into masterpieces.”

In later years Dr. Yang became well known in China, where he helped lead the effort to promote basic research. His fame only increased when in 2004, at age 82, he married Weng Fan, a 28-year-old graduate student at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, whom he had met in 1995 when she served as an interpreter at an international physics seminar. She was, he was quoted as saying in the newspaper The China Daily, his “final blessing from God.”

Dr. Yang — he called himself Frank, after Benjamin Franklin — was part of a generation of young theorists who, after World War II, were confronted with strange new particles bombarding the earth as cosmic rays, begging for explanation. In 1956, he and Dr. Lee took on one of the strangest: a particle, now called the K meson or kaon, that was first revealed by the tracks it left in detectors lofted in balloons and placed on mountaintops. Sometimes a kaon broke into two smaller pieces, called pions, and sometimes it broke into three. That in itself was not so bad, but they decayed in a way that appeared to violate parity conservation, the mirror symmetry long thought to pervade the physical world.

Rather than accept that the principle didn’t apply to these nuclear decays, physicists were forced to posit the existence of two kinds of kaons, christened the theta and the tau. Identical in other respects, they disintegrated in different ways. Like many theorists, Dr. Yang and Dr. Lee wondered whether the explanation was merely a contrivance — an ad hoc way to get around an awkward experimental result. On a spring day in 1956, Dr. Yang — who was based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and spending time at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island — came to New York City for a regular visit with Dr. Lee, who was at Columbia University. At lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant, the two scientists confronted the possibility that the weak force — the engine of nuclear disintegration — ignored mirror symmetry. In a landmark paper published that fall in The Physical Review, they suggested how to find out.

The Columbia physicist Chien-Shiung Wu took on the challenge and showed in an experiment at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Washington that parity was indeed violated by the weak force. As they decayed, atomic nuclei emitted more electrons in one direction than in the other. The symmetry didn’t hold. The slow gears of Stockholm shifted into high, and in 1957 the two physicists were awarded perhaps the quickest Nobel Prize ever. They were the first Chinese-born laureates.

People began to speak of “Lee and Yang” or “Yang and Lee” as if they were a single person, unaware that their relationship was already becoming frayed.

Chen Ning Yang was born on Oct. 1, 1922 (although some published sources give the date as Sept. 22), in Hefei, China, about 300 miles west of Shanghai, the eldest of five children of Yang Wu-zhi and Luo Meng-hua. His father was a professor of mathematics. Dr. Yang’s family lived in Beijing during much of his childhood and early teens, but with the outbreak of war with Japan the family fled to Kunming, in the south. In 1940, the courtyard of the family home was bombed as part of the Japanese effort to shut down the Burma Road, the British supply line to the Chinese nationalists, which terminated in Kunming. After the bombing, the family moved to a suburb.

Shortly after earning a master’s degree in 1944 from Tsinghua University, which during the war had been relocated to Kunming from Beijing, Dr. Yang went to the United States on a fellowship, hoping to study at Columbia with Enrico Ferm, the Italian-born physicist who had overseen the first successful nuclear chain reaction. Surprised to find that Dr. Fermi was headed for the University of Chicago to work on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, Dr. Yang followed him there. It was Dr. Fermi, he later wrote, who taught him that abstractions must be tethered to experiment, that “physics is to be built from the ground up, brick by brick, layer by layer.”

At Chicago, Dr. Yang met up with Dr. Lee, an acquaintance from his student days in China. Completing his thesis under Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born architect of the hydrogen bomb, Dr. Yang received his doctorate in 1948 and, after teaching for a year at Chicago, moved to the Institute for Advanced Study to work for Robert Oppenheimer, who was then its director. Dr. Yang would recall one encounter he had with the institute’s most famous faculty member, Dr. Einstein. Dr. Yang had just published a paper in the The Physical Review, and Dr. Einstein wanted to discuss it with him. They spoke for an hour and a half, Dr. Yang said, but he “did not get very much out of that conversation.” “He spoke very softly,” he said, “and I found it difficult to concentrate on his words, being quite overwhelmed by the nearness of a great physicist whom I had admired for so long.”

Once established in Princeton, Dr. Yang began spending his summers at Brookhaven, where he and an officemate, Robert L. Mills, collaborated on what became known as the Yang-Mills theory, the scaffolding on which much of modern particle physics has been built. Using an idea called gauge theory that had been developed by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl, they created the gauge principle, which explains the interactions and, importantly, the self-interactions, of electromagnetic, weak and strong forces at the heart of quantum physics. “At the time that we wrote it down,” Dr. Yang said of the theory in a 2006 interview at Stony Brook, “nobody believed that it was important and we didn’t know that it was that important, but we said that this is a beautiful idea and the mathematical structure is very elegant, so we published that paper about it. And then 20 years later, various experiments showed that that was approximately the right direction. Then after struggling for another five years, it became clear that it is not just approximately right, it is exactly right.”

He was also collaborating with Dr. Lee, who moved to Columbia after a stint at the Institute for Advanced Study. Beginning in 1956, they published 32 papers together. But tensions were emerging in the partnership, and the two parted ways in 1962. To Dr. Lee’s consternation, Dr. Yang would sometimes pull rank, insisting that his name come first because he was four years older. For this and other reasons, Dr. Lee wrote in a remembrance in 1986, “The delicate symmetry between Yang and myself was disturbed.” Long after, in an interview published in Newsday in 2000, Dr. Yang called the split “a tragedy.”

Dr. Yang was not always modest about his accomplishments. As he approached his 60th birthday, some admiring colleagues offered to contribute papers to a celebratory volume, known as a Festschrift, honoring his legacy. Dr. Yang concluded that a collection of his own papers with commentaries would be more interesting. In that anthology, he described the origins of the Nobel-winning work on parity, giving himself most of the credit. Dr. Lee later published a very different account. Dr. Yang left the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 to become Stony Brook’s Albert Einstein professor of physics and the director of what is now the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics

After a visit to China in 1971, Dr. Yang began reforging old ties. He would later serve as director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and as a professor at his alma mater, Tsinghua University. In 2015, he gave up his United States citizenship to become a citizen of China. Dr. Yang’s wife of 53 years, Chih Li Tu, whom he had met in China when he was teaching middle school and she was a student, died in 2003. In addition to his second wife, Weng Fan, his survivors include three children from his first marriage, Franklin, Gilbert and Eulee Yang; and two grandchildren.

In the interview with Newsday, Dr. Yang said he doubted that physicists would ever converge on a theory of everything. “Nature is extremely subtle,” he said. “I happen to think that the depth of natural substances cannot be fathomed by mankind. Because after all we only have, let’s say, 100 billion neurons. How can you match that with the infinite depth of nature?”