The untold story of Chien-Shiung Wu - "the first lady of physics"

Chien-Shiung Wu is a Chinese-American nuclear physicist. She is known as the "First Lady of Physics", "Queen of Nuclear Research" and "China's Marie Curie". Photo: @ Wikipedia.

Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in the small town of Liu He near Shanghai, China. Her father was Zhong-Yi and her mother was Fanhua Fan. Chien-Shiung Wu was the only daughter and the middle child of three children. Photo: @Biography.

Education was important to Chien-Shiung Wu's family. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an engineer, both of whom encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to pursue her passion for science and mathematics from a young age. Photo: @ThoughtCo.

Chien-Shiung Wu attended Mingde Vocational High School, which her father founded, before leaving to attend Soochow Girls' Boarding School. Photo: @ San Diego Squared.

She then attended Shanghai Gong Xue Public School for a year. In 1930, Chien-Shiung Wu enrolled at China’s oldest and most prestigious university, Nanjing University. There, she initially studied mathematics, but soon switched to physics, inspired by the famous female scientist Marie Curie. Photo: @American Institute of Physics.

Chien-Shiung Wu graduated with honors at the top of her class and received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1934. After graduation, Chien-Shiung Wu taught for a year at the National Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, working at the Academia Sinica physics laboratory. At Academia Sinica, she conducted her first experimental research in X-ray crystallography (1935-1936) under the guidance of Professor Jing-Wei Gu. Photo: @Hackaday.

Professor Jing-Wei Gu encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to pursue graduate studies in the United States, and in 1936, she visited the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Professor Ernest Lawrence, who was responsible for building the first cyclotron. Photo: @Hackaday.

In fact, a Chinese physics student named Luke Chia Yuan inspired Chien-Shiung Wu to stay at Berkeley and get her PhD. Chien-Shiung Wu’s graduate work focused on one topic: “Uranium fission products.” Photo: @The New Inquiry.

After completing her PhD in 1940, Chien-Shiung Wu married another former PhD student, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, on May 30, 1942. The couple moved to the East Coast of the United States, where Luke Chia-Liu Yuan worked at Princeton University, while Chien-Shiung Wu worked at Smith College. Photo: @New Scientist.

After a few years, she accepted an offer from Princeton University as the first female faculty member hired to teach in the department. Photo: @JoySauce.

In 1944, she joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, helping to solve a problem that physicist Enrico Fermi could not solve. She also discovered a way to "enrich uranium ore for bomb fuel." Photo: @ Advanced Science News.

In 1947, the couple welcomed a son, Vincent Wei-Cheng Yuan. Growing up, Vincent Wei-Cheng Yuan continued in his mother's footsteps and also became a nuclear scientist. Photo: @The Matilda Project.

After leaving the Manhattan Project, Chien-Shiung Wu spent the rest of his career in the Department of Physics at Columbia, as a leading experimentalist in beta decay and interaction physics. Photo: @ Columbia Physics.

After being assisted by two male theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, Chien-Shiung Wu used experiments using cobalt-60 (a radioactive form of the metal cobalt) to disprove the "parity law", proposing that parity is not conserved for weak nuclear interactions. Photo: @Lady Science.

Ultimately, this work earned Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang the Nobel Prize in 1957, but Chien-Shiung Wu was left out, as were many other female scientists during this time. Photo: @ Self-Rescuing Princess Society.

Chien-Shiung Wu was aware of gender-based injustice, so at an MIT conference in October 1964, she declared: "I wonder whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules, have any preference in treatment between the male and female sexes?" Photo: @Grandma Got STEM.

Chien-Shiung Wu has been honored with numerous awards throughout her career. In 1958, she was the first woman to receive the American Research Corporation Award, and the seventh woman elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. Photo: @ Science Source Prints.

She also received the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute (1962), the Cyrus B. Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences (1964), the Bonner Prize (1975), the National Medal of Science (1975), and the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), among other honors. Photo: @Feminist Book Club.

In 1974, she was named Scientist of the Year by the American Journal of Industrial Research. In 1976, she became the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society. In 1990, the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Asteroid 2752 after Chien-Shiung Wu. Photo: @ Cosmos Magazine.

Chien-Shiung Wu died of complications from a stroke on February 16, 1997, in New York City at the age of 85. Her cremated remains were buried on the grounds of Mingde Vocational High School. Photo: @ Moving Science.

In 1998, Chien-Shiung Wu was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in the United States, a year after her death. On June 1, 2002, a bronze statue of Chien-Shiung Wu was placed in the courtyard of Mingde Vocational High School to commemorate her. Photo: @ in her genius.

She is remembered as a pioneer in the scientific community, and an inspirational role model. Her granddaughter, Jada Wu Hanjie, commented: "Since I was a child, her passion for research, modesty, and strictness have been deeply ingrained in my mind. My grandmother emphasized a lot about her enthusiasm for the development of national science and education, which I really admire." Photo: @ Forbes.

Dear Readers, please watch the video: 7 Greatest and Most Outstanding Scientists in Human History. Video source: @TACA CHANNEL NEW.

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