This first taste of sexism was just a preview. Wu planned to go to the University of Michigan, but a tour of the University of California, Berkeley-and word that a student center at Michigan forbade female students from entering through the front door-changed her mind. She would not return to China for 36 years-or ever see her parents again. With the help of an uncle and her academic mentors in China, she decided to immigrate to the United States for graduate school. Domestic unrest and a deteriorating relationship with Japan made life at home uneasy. It was a time of rapid change in both the field of physics and China. Soon she transferred to the school’s physics department and began her scientific studies in earnest. Fascinated by new discoveries and the story of women scientists like Marie Curie, she entered National Central University as a math major in 1930. But she was captivated by mathematics and the sciences and began studying them at night. As a young teacher in training, she excelled in school. Unlike many Chinese women of her time, she received a formal education. From China to Americaīorn in 1912 near Shanghai, China, Wu was influenced by her father, an engineer, and her mother, an educator. But today she is just as famous for what didn’t happen next as what did. Her results would skyrocket her from an already prominent career into the history books as one of the founding mothers of science. The woman was Chien-Shiung Wu, and her experiment had just demolished a long-standing pillar of her field-a concept crucial to scientists’ understanding of the world around them. ( For girls in science, the time is now.) “Then thunderous applause and a standing ovation.” “The response was dead silence for two minutes,” an observer recalled afterward. Then she asked the audience if there were any questions. As she told the crowd about her recent experiment and its results, men like J. In 1957 a group of the titans of physics gathered in a lecture hall at Princeton University to be addressed by a diminutive Chinese American woman.
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