Wu Ta-You

Wu Ta-You , also Wu Dayou, (born September 29, 1907 in Guangzhou , † March 4, 2000 in Taipei ) was a Chinese physicist .

Life

Wu studied at Nankai University with a bachelor's degree in 1929 and received his doctorate in 1933 at the University of Michigan under Samuel Abraham Goudsmit . In his dissertation, he generalized the WKB method for the double well potential and used it to calculate energy levels in the electron shell of heavy elements such as uranium . He then taught at Beijing University and, during the time of the Japanese occupation, at the National Southwestern Associated University (SAU) in Kunming . After the communists' victory in the civil war, he went to Canada in 1949 , where he headed the Theoretical Physics department of the National Research Council until 1963. From 1963 he was involved in the creation of the Institute of Physics of Academia Sinica in Taiwan (and its director until 1976) and in 1967 in the establishment of the National Science Council in Taiwan, which he headed as minister until 1973. He was a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1965 to 1978 .

As a theoretical physicist, he dealt with nuclear physics , atomic and molecular physics , solid-state physics and statistical physics . From 1977 he published a series of textbooks on theoretical physics in Chinese.

The later Nobel Prize winners Chen Ning Yang (from 1941) and Tsung-Dao Lee (1945) were his students at the SAU .

From 1983 to 1994 he was President of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, of which he had been a member since 1948. He has multiple honorary doctorates (various universities in Taiwan, Beijing University, Nankai University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University).

In 1946 he represented the Academia Sinica at the 300 year celebrations for Newton's birthday at the Royal Society in London. In 1947 he was visiting professor at Columbia University and New York University . In 1957 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .

In 1936 he married.

Fonts

• Vibrational spectra and structure of polyatomic molecules, Peking: National University Press 1939
• with T. Ohmura: Quantum theory of scattering, Prentice-Hall 1962, Dover 2014
• Kinetic equations of gases and plasmas, Addison-Wesley 1966
• Quantum Mechanics, World Scientific 1986
• with WY. Pauchy Hwang: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Fields, World Scientific 1991

literature

• Shigeyji Fujita (Ed.), The Ta-You Wu Festschrift: science of matter, New York: Gordon and Breach 1978

Web links

• Biography, University of Buffalo, pdf

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wu is the family name here, Ta-You is the first name.