This book contains selected papers of Prof Nambu who is one of the most original and outstanding particle theorists of our time. This volume consists of about 40 papers which made fundamental contributions to our understanding of particle physics during the last few decades. The unpublished lecture note on string theory (1969) and the first paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking (1961) are retyped and included. The book also contains a memoir of Prof Nambu on his research career.

Coming into the 21st century, developments in three major areas of elementary particle physics — the electroweak theory with the Higgs mechanism, quantum chromodynamics, and string theory began to yield more and more concrete and successful results.Seeds of all these developments in contemporary particle physics were sowed by Nambu in prophetic lectures and papers from the 1960s-70s.The discovery of the Higgs-like scalar particle at the Large Hadron Collider in July 2011 was the climax for the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking that Nambu had laid down at the beginning of the...

Coming into the 21st century, developments in three major areas of elementary particle physics — the electroweak theory with the Higgs mechanism, quantum chromodynamics, and string theory began to yield more and more concrete and successful results.Seeds of all these developments in contemporary particle physics were sowed by Nambu in prophetic lectures and papers from the 1960s-70s.The discovery of the Higgs-like scalar particle at the Large Hadron Collider in July 2011 was the climax for the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking that Nambu had laid down at the beginning of the...