Born in
Shanghai, he studied
electrical engineering at
University of Minnesota and became a
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition fellow (1953). He obtained an
S.M. (1954) and
Ph.D. (1956) in
applied physics from
Harvard University. His thesis concerned
I. The Concept of Impedance II. High Frequency Scattering and was advised by
Ronold W. P. King. At Harvard, he continued as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (1956–59), joined the faculty of applied physics (1959) and was the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics & Professor of Physics. Wu has also had visiting appointments with
Rockefeller University (1966), at the
DESY in
Hamburg, Germany (1971), at
CERN in
Geneva, Switzerland and
Utrecht University (1977). He has studied
statistical mechanics on
Bose–Einstein condensation in an external potential, classical
electromagnetic theory (1960). With
Hung Cheng, he used gauge
quantum field theory to predict the unboundedly increasing total scattering cross sections at very high energies, experimentally verified at
CERN and
Tevatron collider. Wu studied production processes for the
Large Hadron Collider, in particular to predict the production cross section of a
Higgs particle with low momentum together with two forward jets. His studies with
Chen Ning Yang include
CP violation, globalization of the gauge theory,
Wu–Yang monopole, and the
Wu–Yang dictionary. More recently, Wu has studied
quantum information processing based on the
Schrödinger equation without any spatial dimension in the modeling and application of quantum memories. He published his last research paper on Concept of the basic standard model and a relation between the three gauge coupling constants at the age of 90 along with his wife
Sau Lan Wu. He died on July 19, 2024 at the Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California. ==Honours and awards==