Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist whose feel for mathematical aesthetics helped reveal a surprising kink in the weave of nature, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 103.

His death was announced by Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Yang taught for many years.

Yang and a colleague, physicist Tsung-Dao Lee, created a sensation in 1956 by proposing that one of the four forces of nature might violate a seemingly ironclad principle called conservation of parity — a way of saying that a phenomenon and its mirror image should behave precisely the same. Their prediction was quickly borne out by experiment, and they shared the Nobel Prize in physics.

When Yang retired from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1999, a colleague, distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, called him “the preeminent stylist” of 20th century physics, exceeded only by Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac.

Yang’s sense of mathematical beauty, Dyson said, “turns his least important calculations into miniature works of art, and turns his deeper speculations into masterpieces.”

In later years, Yang became well known in China, where he helped lead the effort to promote basic research. His fame only increased when in 2004, at age 82, he married Weng Fan, a 28-year-old graduate student at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, whom he had met in 1995 when she served as an interpreter at an international physics seminar. She was, he was quoted as saying in the newspaper The China Daily, his “final blessing from God.”

Yang — he called himself Frank, after Benjamin Franklin — was part of a generation of young theorists who, after World War II, were confronted with strange new particles bombarding the earth as cosmic rays, begging for explanation. In 1956, he and Lee took on one of the strangest: a particle, now called the K meson or kaon, that was first revealed by the tracks it left in detectors lofted in balloons and placed on mountaintops.

Sometimes a kaon broke into two smaller pieces, called pions, and sometimes it broke into three. That in itself was not so bad, but they decayed in a way that appeared to violate parity conservation, the mirror symmetry long thought to pervade the physical world.

Rather than accept that the principle didn’t apply to these nuclear decays, physicists were forced to posit the existence of two kinds of kaons, christened the theta and the tau. Identical in other respects, they disintegrated in different ways.

Like many theorists, Yang and Lee wondered whether the explanation was merely a contrivance — an ad hoc way to get around an awkward experimental result. On a spring day in 1956, Yang — who was based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and spending time at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island — came to New York City for a regular visit with Lee, who was at Columbia University.

At lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant, the two scientists confronted the possibility that the weak force — the engine of nuclear disintegration — ignored mirror symmetry. In a landmark paper published that fall in The Physical Review, they suggested how to find out.

Columbia physicist Chien-Shiung Wu took on the challenge and showed in an experiment at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Washington that parity was indeed violated by the weak force. As they decayed, atomic nuclei emitted more electrons in one direction than in the other. The symmetry didn’t hold.

The slow gears of Stockholm shifted into high, and in 1957 the two physicists were awarded perhaps the quickest Nobel Prize ever. They were the first Chinese-born laureates.

Chen Ning Yang was born on Oct. 1, 1922 (although some published sources give the date as Sept. 22), in Hefei, China, about 300 miles west of Shanghai, the eldest of five childrens.

Yang’s family lived in Beijing during much of his childhood and early teens, but with the outbreak of war with Japan the family fled to Kunming, in the south. In 1940, the courtyard of the family home was bombed as part of the Japanese effort to shut down the Burma Road, the British supply line to the Chinese nationalists, which terminated in Kunming. After the bombing, the family moved to a suburb.

Shortly after earning a master’s degree in 1944 from Tsinghua University, which during the war had been relocated to Kunming from Beijing,

Yang went to the United States on a fellowship, hoping to study at Columbia with Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had overseen the first successful nuclear chain reaction.

Surprised to find that Fermi was headed for the University of Chicago to work on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, Yang followed him there.

It was Fermi, he later wrote, who taught him that abstractions must be tethered to experiment, that “physics is to be built from the ground up, brick by brick, layer by layer.”