Lee was born in
Macau, then part of the
Portuguese Empire, and called "Yuwing" or "YW" by his friends. He was a longtime collaborator of Wiener.
Everett M. Rogers, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication and Journalism at the
University of New Mexico, noted in his highly acclaimed book on the history of communication research that "out of his collaboration with a former doctoral student from China, Y. W. Lee, Wiener in 1934 became interested in the concept of
feedback, the building block in the cybernetic theory that was to make him world famous." After receiving a B.S. in 1927, an M.S. in 1928, and a Sc.D. in 1930 at MIT , Lee returned to China and taught at
Tsinghua University. He invited Wiener there in 1935–1937. In 1946, he came back to MIT as Visiting Professor and undertook his research on statistical communication theory. He stayed at MIT as Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering until his retirement in 1969. He was an excellent teacher and an experienced mentor.
John Costas,
Harry L. Van Trees,
Irwin Jacobs and
Amar Bose were among his students at MIT. He then moved to
Belmont, California and died from leukemia in
San Mateo, California. Charles W. Therrien, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the
Naval Postgraduate School, who considered Lee as one of the unsung heroes of his era, stated: "Lee’s own contributions, although significant, are not well known. However, his contributions to teaching and bringing the ideas of Wiener into electrical engineering are without precedent." Lee was the first scientist who "used the term
network synthesis filters in modern sense" in 1930 and "used the term
synthesis to describe the process of assembling an array of elements to meet a specific set of performance requirements in
network synthesis by means of
Fourier transforms of Laguerre functions" in 1932. ==Publications==