Professor Hideki Yukawa, c mid-20th century

Hideki Yukawa, born Hideki Ogawa on 23 January 1907, died 8 September 1981, was a theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 for his prediction of the existence of mesons. Yukawa graduated with his bachelor's from Kyoto Imperial University in 1929, and stayed to lecture for a further four years. In 1932, he married Sumi Yukawa. As he came from a family of many sons, and his father-in-law had none, he was adopted by his father-in-law and adopted the new family name of Yukawa. They had two sons together. In 1933, he became a lecturer at Osaka Imperial University. In 1938, he received a PhD from Osaka Imperial University, his research on mesons owing for his Nobel Prize. In 1940, he became a professor in Kyoto Imperial University, after which he won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy and Decoration of Cultural Merit. Yukawa became a professor at Columbia University in 1949, and also signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for nuclear disarmament in 1955. Yukawa retired from Kyoto University in 1970, as Professor Emeritus, and died in 1981, aged 74, from pneumonia and heart failure. Yukawa received many awards besides the Nobel Prize, including ForMemRS (1963), and Lomonosov Gold Medal (1963), as well as honorary memberships in the Royal Society, the Royal Society in Edinburgh, and the American Philosophical Society.