On this day
Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu announced experimental proof that nature violates 'conservation of parity,' overturning a basic assumption of physics; her Columbia colleagues Lee and Yang won the Nobel, but Wu-later the first woman to lead the American Physical Society-did not. (Shares Jan 15 with Gary Locke's governorship.)
Gary Locke was inaugurated as governor of Washington, the first Chinese American governor in US history and the first Asian American governor of a mainland state.
On January 15, 1998, President Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation's highest civilian honor — for his lifelong stand against the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, which he had challenged all the way to the Supreme Court in 1944.