Theodore Yao-Tsu Wu

Theodore Yao-Tsu Wu (born March 20, 1924 in Changzhou ) is a Chinese-American engineering scientist .

Wu studied at the Chiao Tung National University in Shanghai with a bachelor's degree in 1946, then taught for a year and went to the United States in 1948. There he made his master's degree at Iowa State University in the same year and then went on to work as Caltech , where he received his doctorate under Paco Lagerstrom in 1952. At Lagerstrom he further developed its asymptotic methods for solving flow problems and also worked on water waves and hydrodynamics. In 1955 he became an Assistant Professor and in 1961 Professor of Applied Mechanics at Caltech. In 1996 he retired, but remained scientifically active.

In 1964/65 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Hamburg , 1980 visiting professor at Berkeley and 1982 in Japan.

At Caltech he dealt with the biological applications of hydrodynamics (bird flight, swimming of fish) and hydrodynamics of water waves.

In 1993 he received the American Physical Society's Hydrodynamics Prize and the Von Karman Medal in 2004 . He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering , the Academia Sinica , a fellow of the American Physical Society and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

From 1982 to 2001 he was Associate Editor of Advances in Applied Mechanics.

Fonts

• A unified theory for modeling water waves, Advances in Applied Mechanics, Volume 37, 2001, pp. 1-88

Web links

• Homepage at Caltech
• Biography at the APS