Dr. Chien Shiung Wu was a physicist who performed a historic experiment, overturning what had been considered a fundamental law of nature. In her most famous experiment, announced in 1957, she and her colleagues overthrew a law of symmetry in physics called the principle of conservation of parity that had been considered unshakeable for 30 years.
Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Shanghai, China, in 1912. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in China in 1934, and came to the United States in 1936. As a nuclear physicist, Dr. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. She became a professor of physics at Columbia, and later held honorary professorships at several Chinese Universities.
She did receive numerous honours and awards, Including being the first woman elected president of the American Physical Society. She died in New York in February 1997.