Yukawa, Hideki, << yoo KAH wah, hee deh kee >> (1907-1981), a Japanese theoretical physicist, won the 1949 Nobel Prize in physics, the first Japanese to be honored with a Nobel Prize. Yukawa received the award for a theory he published in 1935. His theory predicted the existence of the subatomic particles now known as mesons (see Meson ). The meson was first discovered in 1947.
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, scientists studying the atom were puzzled by how the nucleus holds together. Yukawa’s theory concluded that protons and neutrons in the nucleus attract one another by exchanging mesons.
Hideki Ogawa was born in Tokyo on Jan. 23, 1907. He changed his name to Hideki Yukawa in 1932. He studied at Kyoto Imperial University (later renamed Kyoto University) and became a professor there in 1939. From 1948 to 1949, he was a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Yukawa served as director of the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics at Kyoto University from 1953 to 1970. He died on Sept. 8, 1981.
