He was born in
Tianjin in August 1926. He was famous for his excellent performances in
Yaohua High School. Later he was admitted by Department of Electrical engineering of
Peking University, however, out of the passion for the physical theories, he transferred into Department of Physics to work on theory. From 1949, Yu started his postgraduate research in the Department of Physics of
Peking University, and also served as a teaching assistant. In 1951, he became an assistant researcher and associate researcher at Modern Physics Institute of
Chinese Academy of Sciences, and began to study nuclear physics theory under the supervision of
Peng Huanwu. In 1951 he joined the Institute of Atomic Energy. Yu's major contributions included the solutions to a series of fundamental and critical theoretical problems of nuclear weapons, which led to the breakthrough of the
hydrogen bomb. He gained reputation and became the academician of Chinese Academy of Science for his design of the hydrogen bomb. By 1978, Yu had planned an approach to neutron bomb design using information he had collected from newspaper reports, proposing to "hammer out" the neutron bomb "through three beats". With the
RMB 5 million prize, Yu founded the Yu Min Foundation to support scientific development in China. The following year, he became a laureate of the
Asian Scientist 100 by the
Asian Scientist. Yu died in Beijing on 16 January 2019. ==Personal life==