This paper is a biography about a Chinese-American nuclear physicist who contributed to the Manhattan Project and made history with an experiment that disproved the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. Her name was Chien-Shiung Wu. Chien-Shiung Wu was born May 31st, 1912 in the small town of Liu He (Ho) located near Shanghai, China to Zhong-Yi and Fanhua Fan. Of the three children her parents had, she was the only daughter. Education was very important to the Wu family, her mother being a teacher and her father being an engineer. At a very early age, Chien-Shiung Wu was encouraged by her parents to pursue the career of science and mathematics. She attended one of the first elementary school that admitted girls, Mingde Women’s Vocational…show more content… She went here to pursue mathematics, but it switched to majoring in physics, which was inspired by Marie Curie. She graduated top honors at the head of her class with a B.S. degree in 1934. In 1936, Chien-Shiung moved to California and attended the University of California so she could pursue her graduate studies. There she met Professor Ernest Lawrence who was responsible for the first cyclotron and later won a Nobel Peace Prize, and met another Chinese physics student, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan. Lawrence and Yuan encouraged Chien-Shiung Wu to stay at Berkeley and pursue her Ph.D. In 1940, Chien-Shiung Wu completed her Ph.D and married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan on May 30, 1942, and moved to the East Coast where Yuan worked at Princeton University and Wu at Smith College. A few years later, Wu accepted an offer from Princeton University as the first female instructor ever hired to join the faculty. In 1944, Wu joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University where she helped solve a problem that Enrico Fermi struggled with, and developed a process to enrich uranium ore that produced large quantities of uranium as fuel for atomic…show more content… In 1962, she earned the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute. In 1964, she earned the National Academy of Sciences Cyrus B. Comstock Award in Physics, the Bonner Prize and the National Medal of Science in 1975, and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. She also received a Sc.D. from Princeton University in 1958, making her the first woman to earn this award. The Industrial Research Magazine named Wu Scientist of the Year in 1974, and the first woman to serve as the president of the American Physical Society. In 1990, Asteroid 2752 was named after her by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, making her the first living scientist to receive this honor. 1995, Yuan T. Lee, Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang, and Samuel C. C. Tang founded the Wu Chien-Shiung Education foundation in Taiwan. It’s purpose, was to provide scholarships for young scientists, later in 1998, Wu was inducted into the American National Women’s Hall of Fame. Wu died February 16, 1997 in New York City, due to complications of a stroke. She died at the age of 84. She was creamated and her remains were buried on the grounds of Mingde Senior High
