Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu
Born	May 13, 1912 Shanghai
Died	February 16, 1997 New York
Nationality	Chinese
Citizenship	American
Scientific career
Fields	physics

Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxíong; May 13, 1912–February 16, 1997) was a Chinese born American physicist with an expertise in radioactivity. She worked on the Manhattan Project (to enrich the uranium fuel) and disproved the conservation of parity. Her nicknames to many scientists are “First Lady of Physics”, “Madame Curie of China” and also “Madame Wu”. She was killed by her second stroke, at noon on February 16, 1997.

China

Although her ancestral family home is Taicang (in Jiangsu Province China), she was born in 1912, in Shanghai, but was raised in Liuhe, a city about 30 miles from Shanghai. Her father, Wu Zhongyi (吳仲裔), was a proponent of gender equality and founded Mingde Women's Vocational Continuing School. She left her hometown at the age of eleven to go to the Suzhou Women's Normal School No. 2. Her mother was Fan Fuhua (樊復華).

She was admitted to the National Central University in Nanjing in 1929. According to the government regulations of the time, normal school students entering universities needed to serve as teachers for one year, so in 1929 she went to teach in the Public School of China (中國公學) founded by Hu Shi in Shanghai. From 1930 to 1934, she studied in the Physics Department of National Central University (renamed Nanjing University in 1949). For two years after her graduation, she did postgraduate study and worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University

America

In 1936, she went to the USA with a female friend, Dong Ruofen (董若芬), a chemist from Taicang China. Wu studied at the University of California, Berkeley under Ernest Orlando Lawrence[1] and received her Ph.D in 1940.

She married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, also a physicist, two years later. They had a son, Vincent (袁緯承), who became a physicist as well. The family moved to the East Coast, where Wu taught at Smith College, Princeton University, (1942－44) and Columbia University (1944－1980).

At Columbia she contributed to the Manhattan Project by developing a process to separate uranium isotopes by gaseous diffusion and by developing improved Geiger counters. She assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development (with Chen Ning Yang) by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. Some consider this very instrumental in the creation of the laws, but she did not share their Nobel Prize – a fact widely blamed on sexism by the selection committee.

Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists.

She later conducted research into the molecular changes in the deformation of hemoglobins that cause sickle-cell disease.

Wu set precedents for womankind on several occasions. She was:

• the first female instructor in the Physics Department of Princeton University;
• the first woman with a Princeton honorary doctorate;
• the first female President of the American Physical Society (1975, through an election).

Honors

Wu won numerous honors and recognitions:

• Member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1958)
• Research Corporation Award 1958
• Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960
• Comstock Award, National Academy of Sciences 1964
• Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965
• Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974
• Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975
• National Medal of Science (U.S.) 1975
• Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978
• Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh
• Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Fellow American Physical Society

At the time of her death, Wu was Pupin Professor Emerita of Physics at Columbia.

External links

• Chien-Shiung Wu in CWP at UCLA

• Wu Chien Shiung Education Foundation (Chinese-English bilingual)

• Eulogy-biography (Columbia)
• A large black/white photo and a mini-bio