Wu Jianxiong (1912—1997), female, a Chinese American, a native of Liuhe Town in Taicang, Jiangsu; wife of the nuclear physician Yuan Jialiu. Wu was born into an intellectual family. In 1923, she was admitted to Suzhou No. 2 Women’s Normal School and graduated with distinction in 1927. Upon her graduation, Wu worked as a primary school teacher. Two years later, she was enrolled by National Central University in Nanjing and studied at Department of Mathematics. The following year saw her transfer her major to Department of Physics. After winning her bachelor degree, Wu accepted the job offer as an assistant in Department of Physics of Zhejiang University and then did research work at Academia Sinica. Wu went to University of California to further her education in 1936 and received her doctoral degree in 1940. She pioneered the study of the radioactive gas xenon and participated in the atomic bomb research programme known as “Manhattan Project” in 1944. Wu worked as an associate professor in Columbia University in 1952 and was promoted to be a professor in 1958. In the same year, Princeton University awarded her the title of an honorary doctorate of science. It was the first time for this university to offer this title to a woman. At the same time, Wu Jianxiong was elected as a member of the American National Academy of Sciences. Since 1972, Wu worked as a professor of physics at Princeton University until her retirement in 1980. She became the first female president of the American Physical Society in 1975. In the same year, Wu was awarded National Medal of Science, the top honorable prize in America, by President Roosevelt at the White House. The year 1978 witnessed Wu win Wolf Prize in Israel. In 1982, Wu Jianxiong was appointed as an honorary professor by several universities in China, namely Nanjing University, Peking University and University of Science and Technology of China. She was also a member of the Academic Committee of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1994, Wu was elected as one of the first batch of foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wu’s major contributions were as follows: her experimental conformity of the parity violations in weak interactions via experiments on the beta decay process in 1957, and her experimental conformity of the conservation of vector current in beta decay in 1963. Her researches on beta decay were of great significance to the development of nuclear physics and particle physics. As an acknowledged top scientist in these academic fields, Wu won almost all the influential prizes but Nobel Prize. She died of illness in New York. Her tomb is located in Liuhe Town in Taicang, Jiangsu Province. There is a Wu Jianxiong Memorial on the campus of her alma mater Southeast University.
Search
