By Calla Song
From nicknames of “Chinese Madame Curie” and the “First Lady of Physics” Chien-Shiung Wu already seems extraordinary, and reality definitely does not disappoint. Born on May 31, 1912 in a small village north of Shanghai she encountered barriers typical of the time based on her gender, however due to encouragement from her family she was able to pursue education in spite of prevailing gender norms.
After graduating top of her class from National Central University in Nanking (now Nanjing University), Wu continued her education and completed her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. Being unsuccessful in finding a research position, Wu accepted a faculty position at Princeton University, becoming the first woman hired at their physics department.
However Wu wouldn’t stay at Princeton for long. She joined the Manhattan Project’s lab in Columbia University where she helped develop the first nuclear weapons through improving the accuracy of Geiger counters, devices that can detect and measure ionizing radiation, when faced with large quantities. Due to her status as a woman, and the historical background of increased distrust towards Asians following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Wu without a doubt would have encountered many set-backs during this time.
Similar to Rosalind Franklin, Wu was not awarded a Nobel Prize for her work when her male colleagues did. Theoretical physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee jointly shared the 1957 Physics Nobel Prize for their theory on conservation of parity not applying to beta decay, which ran contrary to the previously widely accepted belief of conservation of parity applying to everything in the physics community. While Yang and Lee’s theoretical work was rewarded through the Nobel Prize, Wu’s famous “Wu experiment” which proved their theory was not given the same respect. However, unlike Franklin, Wu was not completely forgotten about. From the publicly accessible records of 1958-1966, she had received at least seven Nobel Prize nominations and was mentioned in the 1957 ceremony speech itself.
As a Columbia Professor, she received pay equal to her male colleagues and won many honors including the Comstock Prize in physics, awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1964, and National Medal of Science, awarded by the President of the United States in 1975 for her aforementioned experiment. Furthermore, in 1975 she was the first woman elected to be president of the American Physical Society, and in 1978 she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics.