- Yang was a permanent member of the prestigious IAS and already a highly-regarded theorist.
- Robert Mills was a very young physicist who had just finished his Ph.D. (though he officially received it in 1955) and was a research associate at Brookhaven. Yang was 31, and Mills was 27 when the paper was published.
The authorship order, Yang and Mills, follows the convention of placing the more senior physicist's name first, which is often done in physics to reflect the primary contribution or status, even when alphabetical order might suggest otherwise. Yang was the one who conceived the core idea of generalizing gauge invariance.
