Wu, Chien-Shiung 1912-97
US physicist

Born in Shanghai, China, she studied at the National Centre University in China, and from 1936 in the USA, at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1946 she was on the staff of Columbia University, New York, where she was appointed professor in 1957. In 1956 Wu and her colleagues tested Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang's hypothesis that parity is not conserved in weak decays, and they observed the emission of electrons preferentially in one direction, thus proving that parity was not conserved. This was later explained by the V-A theory of weak interactions proposed by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann.