About Hideki Yukawa
Hideki Yukawa (Japanese: 湯川 秀樹; né Ogawa; 23 January 1907 – 8 September 1981) was a Japanese theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces." == Early life and education == Hideki Ogawa was born on 23 January 1907 in Tokyo, Japan, the third son of Takuji Ogawa, and grew up in Kyoto, where his father became Professor of Geology at Kyoto Imperial University. He read the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean, and later Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. His father, for a time, considered sending him to technical college rather than university since he was "not as outstanding a student as his older brothers." However, when his father broached the idea with his middle school principal, the principal praised his "high potential" in mathematics and offered to adopt Ogawa himself in order to keep him on a scholarly career. At that, his father relented. Ogawa decided against becoming a mathematician when his high school teacher marked his exam answer as incorrect when Ogawa proved a theorem but in a different manner than the teacher expected. He decided against a career in experimental physics in college when he demonstrated clumsiness in glassblowing, a requirement for experiments in spectroscopy. In 1929, Ogawa graduated from Kyoto Imperial University, where he was a lecturer from 1932 to 1939. During this period, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1933, he became Lecturer and Assistant Professor of Physics at Osaka Imperial University. == Career and research == In 1935, Yukawa published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons at Osaka Imperial University, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.