Mr. Shau-Jin Chang passed away at his home in San Jose, CA on the morning of January 25, 2025. He was 88 years old. Mr. Chang was a retired theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and father of the author Iris Chang. Mr. Chang suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years prior to his passing. He was hospitalized in October last year for a fall and hospitalized again in December due to pneumonia and complications arising from his accident.

Shau-Jin Chang was born in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China on January 7, 1937. His father, Naifan Chang, was the magistrate of Suqian County at the time. His mother Dichen Cao was from Huaiyin, Jiangsu Province, China. Mr. Chang escaped to Chongqing with his parents during the Japanese invasion of China and grew up there during the Second World War. This period was deeply embedded in his memory and years later inspired his daughter Iris to write the historical bestseller The Rape of Nanking.

Mr. Chang arrived in Taiwan with his mother in 1951, graduated from Wenshan High School, and enrolled in the Department of Physics of National Taiwan University after placing first in Group A of the joint entrance examination. After graduating with honors in mathematics and physics, he received a master's degree in physics from the Graduate School of Tsinghua University in Taiwan. In 1962, he received a scholarship from Harvard University to study physics in the United States. He studied under Professor Julian Schwinger, the Nobel Prize Laurate in physics, and received his doctorate in 1967. In 1964, he married Ms. Ying-Ying Chang, who was also studying at Harvard University. From 1967 to 1969, he did his post- doctoral research in high-energy theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Afterwards he joined the physics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign for thirty years. Professor Chang retired in 1999, and in 2003 he moved to San Jose, CA to be closer to his children. Professor Chang has published nearly 100 research papers, mainly on high-energy particle theoretical physics. His critically acclaimed book Introduction to Quantum Field Theory was published in 1990.

Professor Chang was a mentor who took his studies seriously and was dedicated to teaching. He won the Best Teacher Award in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois many times. He was a member of the American Physics Society and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Physics, National Taiwan University.

Iris summed it up at his retirement party in 1999:
"......My father, too, represented an ideal for me to aspire to. He is, perhaps, one of the most idealistic people I know -- one of the rare individual on this earth motivated solely by the pursuit of knowledge, rather than personal ambition…Money, power, social status -- all of these things meant nothing to him unless he could enjoy a quiet intellectual life, doing the two things he loved most: physics, and the nurturing of young minds. I consider him blessed because he found that life at the University of Illinois.

Father also possessed a strong sense of justice. I always believed that had he not become a physicist that he would have made an excellent judge. He had a keen sense of what was fair, as well as the uncanny ability to perceive an issue from all different points of view. But he also had a deep compassion for others, an intuitive understanding of human weakness, and a genuine sympathy for the underdog, a feeling that extended even to animals.....Nothing distressed him more than to see a helpless creature hurt, just as nothing infuriated him more than to see a blatant abuse of power.

Perhaps what I admire most about my father is that he never lost that childlike wonder for the world. Rare in a world of cynics, Father has retained his fascination for the universe, and for all the mysteries that lie within. For him, education is a lifelong endeavor. He devours books like a student, reading biology, computer science, literature, history, astronomy, psychology -- to name just a few subjects that interest him. He is what Einstein would have considered the quintessential intellectual -- the person who learns for the same reasons a child wants to learn…for love, curiosity, and the sheer thrill of discovery….."

Mr. Shau-Jin Chang was the fourth and youngest child in his family. His eldest brother Shao- Yuan Chang (1928-2003) lived in New York. His second oldest brother Shao-Da Chang died of meningitis in Chongqing during the war. He is survived by his third oldest brother, Frank Shao-Chien (born 1935), a retired civil engineer in Los Angeles.

Mr. Chang is also survived by Ying-Ying Chang, his wife of 60 years, as well as his son Michael Chang. His late daughter Iris Chang passed in 2004.

After Mr. Chang's body is cremated, he will be buried next to Iris in the Holy Family section at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Los Altos, CA.
(Written by Ying-Ying Chang)