Book excerpt: The International Symposium on Frontiers of Science was held to celebrate the 80th birthday of Chen Ning Yang, one of the great physicists of the 20th century and arguably the most-admired living scientist in China today. Many of the world's great scientists — including sixteen Nobel laureates, Fields medallists and Wolf Prize winners — converged on Beijing from all corners of the globe to pay tribute to Professor Yang.The Symposium was organized by Tsinghua University, with which Professor Yang has had a lifelong relationship. In 1997, he helped to found the Center for Advanced Study at Tsinghua, was appointed to the university's faculty, and has since devoted his energy to the growth of the Center.This unique and invaluable birthday volume is a collection of the presentations made at the Symposium, including fifteen plenary talks, seven of which are by Nobel laureates. It covers a wide range of topics and mirrors Professor Yang's research and intellectual interests. The range of fields encompasses high-energy, condensed-matter, mathematical, applied, bio-, astro-, atomic and quantum physics. Also included are talks given at the birthday banquet.About C N YangBorn in 1922 in Anwhei, China, C N Yang was brought up in the academic atmosphere of Tsinghua University in Beijing, where his father was a professor of mathematics. He received his college education at the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, China, and completed his BSc there in 1942. His MSc was received in 1944 from Tsinghua University. He entered the University of Chicago in 1946, where he came under the strong influence of Prof E Fermi. After receiving his PhD in 1948, Prof Yang served for a year at the University of Chicago as an instructor. Since 1949 he has been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he became a professor in 1955.Prof Yang has worked on various subjects in physics, but is mainly interested in statistical mechanics and symmetry principles. He is a prolific author, his numerous articles appearing in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, The Physical Review, Reviews of Modern Physics and the Chinese Journal of Physics.Prof Yang won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, jointly with T-D Lee. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of Academia Sinica.