Family Lee was born in
Shanghai, China, with his
ancestral home in nearby
Suzhou. His father Chun-kang Lee (), one of the first graduates of the
University of Nanking, was a
chemical industrialist and
merchant who was involved in China's early development of modern synthesized
fertilizer. Lee's grandfather Chong-tan Lee () was the first Chinese Methodist Episcopal senior pastor of . Lee had four brothers and one sister. Educator
Robert C. T. Lee was one of T. D.'s brothers. Lee's mother Chang and brother Robert C. T. moved to
Taiwan in the 1950s.
Early life Lee received his secondary education in Shanghai (High School Affiliated to Soochow University, 東吳大學附屬中學) and
Jiangxi (Jiangxi Joint High School, 江西聯合中學). Due to the
Second Sino-Japanese War, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he did not obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly applied to and was admitted by the National Chekiang University (now
Zhejiang University). Initially, Lee registered as a student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Very quickly, Lee's talent was discovered and his interest in physics grew rapidly. Several physics professors, including
Shu Xingbei and
Wang Ganchang, largely guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics of
National Che Kiang University, where he studied in 1943–1944. , 2006 In the early 1960s, Lee and collaborators initiated the important field of high-energy
neutrino physics. In 1964, Lee, with M. Nauenberg, analyzed the divergences connected with particles of zero rest mass, and described a general method known as the
KLN theorem for dealing with these divergences, which still plays an important role in contemporary work in
QCD, with its massless, self-interacting gluons. In 1974–75, Lee published several papers on "A New Form of Matter in High Density", which led to the modern field of RHIC physics, now dominating the entire high-energy
nuclear physics field. Besides
particle physics, Lee was active in
statistical mechanics,
astrophysics,
hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, and lattice QCD. In 1983, Lee wrote a paper entitled, "Can Time Be a Discrete Dynamical Variable?"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations. Beginning in 1975, Lee and collaborators established the field of
non-topological solitons, which led to his work on soliton stars and
black holes throughout the 1980s and 1990s. From 1997 to 2003, Lee was director of the
RIKEN-
BNL Research Center (now director emeritus), which together with other researchers from Columbia, completed a 1 teraflops supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD in 1998 and a 10 teraflops
QCDOC machine in 2005. Leading up to 2005, Lee and
Richard M. Friedberg developed a new method to solve the
Schrödinger equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other instanton problems. They also did work on the neutrino mapping matrix. Lee was one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President
George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the
Department of Energy's
Office of Science, the
National Science Foundation, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. == Educational activities ==