Chien-Shiung Wu, Chinese-American Physicist
Chien-shiung Wu at Columbia University with Wallace Reed Brode. Chien-Shiung Wu (May 31, 1912 - February 16, 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, and the Chinese Marie Curie. 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. Wallace Reed Brode (June 12, 1900 - August 1974) was an American chemist. He was president of the American Chemical Society in 1969 and of the Optical Society of America in 1961. He received the Priestley Medal in 1960. No photographer credited, March 15, 1958.
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