Chien-Shiung Wu, Chinese-American Physicist
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a Chinese-American physicist. Wu became a faculty member at Smith College, then Princeton University and finally at Columbia University in New York City, beginning in 1944 and continuing for many years after the war, all the way through 1980. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project (she helped to develop the process for separating uranium metal into the U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion). In 1956, Wu and Tsung-Dao Lee experimentally confirmed a theory that parity is violated during weak radioactive decay, overturning many basic assumptions of particle physics. Wu experimentally confirmed other particle theories, as well as studying muonic atom X-ray spectra. She later performed experiments that contradicted the "Law of Conservation of Parity" and which confirmed the theories of colleagues. Her honorary nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Marie Curie", and "Madame Wu". She was the first living scientist to have an asteroid named after her. Wu died in 1997 after suffering her second stroke at the age of 84.
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