Kenneth C. Zirkel · CC BY-SA 3.0

Lee shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Richardson and Douglas Osheroff for discovering superfluidity in helium-3 — a state in which the liquid isotope flows with zero viscosity, offering physicists a laboratory system for studying quantum behavior at a scale large enough to observe directly. He spent his career at Cornell, later also holding a position at Texas A&M.