Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎, Nanbu Yōichirō, 18 January 1921 – 5 July 2015) was a Japanese-born American physicist, a professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism.