Yang Zhenning (second from right) and his wife Weng Fan receive a donation certificate from Luo Shugang (second from left), Minister of Culture, and Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Yang Zhenning (Chen-Ning Franklin Yang), 94, and Xiong Bingming (Ping-Ming Hsiung, 1922-2002) knew each other since they were 7 years old.

Both their fathers were prominent mathematicians and professors at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The two families were neighbors for eight years.

The boys went to same elementary and secondary schools and stuck together all the time. They both graduated from National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan province, in the 1940s.

Yang later went to the United States, and the physicist became the first Chinese to win a Nobel Prize in 1957. Xiong pursued PhD studies in philosophy in France in 1947, but a year later, he transferred to study sculpture and became a Paris-based artist.

Although living on different continents, the two maintained a long friendship. Xiong gave many of his sculptures to Yang, among which there is one bronze piece, Penholder, specially made for Yang in the late 1950s and bearing both their initials on the back.