Born on May 31, 1912, in Jiangsu province of China, a time when women’s education was rare in China, Chien-Shiung Wu was a woman who defied social norms and made her mark in the field of science by becoming the most influential physicist of the 20th century. She was a physicist whose prowess revolutionised our understanding of the subatomic world.
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-born American physicist who proved that the principle of parity conservation does not occur in weak subatomic interactions, and this groundbreaking experiment changed the landscape of particle physics. She was from a middle-class family that valued education. She graduated from National Central University, Nanjing, in 1934. She pursued her interest in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied under Ernest O Lawrence.
Wu was also a part of the Manhattan Project (building nuclear weapons during World War II), where she was involved in the development of the atomic bomb. She was responsible for enriching uranium and detecting radiation technologies.
She is mostly known for her notable work – ‘using cobalt-60, an isotope that undergoes beta decay – under this project, through which she showed that parity was not conserved in weak nuclear interactions.
Though she made this significant contribution to the field of physics, Wu did not receive the Nobel Prize for this specific work, but she created a legacy that is enshrined in the numerous awards and honours she garnered throughout her career. Wu passed away on February 16, 1997, in New York City.