Background
Wu was born in Panyu, Guangzhou (Canton).
吴大猷, 吳大猷
Wu was born in Panyu, Guangzhou (Canton).
He moved to the United States for graduate schooling and took a Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of Michigan in 1933.
He has been called the "Father of Chinese Physics." In 1929 he took his undergraduate degree at Nankai University in Tianjin (Tientsin). Doctor Wu returned to China, and between 1934 and 1949 he taught at various institutions there, including Peking University in Beijing, and National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming. In 1949, the year of the defeat of the Communists over the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, Wu fled to Canada.
There he headed the Theoretical Physics Division of the National Research Council until 1963.
In the late 1960s, he was chair of the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University at Buffalo. After 1962, he held various positions in Taiwan, including President of the Academia Sinica (1983–1994).
He continued lecturing into his 90s and died on March 4, 2000. Wu"s Doctor of Philosophy dissertation dealt with theoretical predictions of the chemical properties of the yet undiscovered transuranic elements of the actinide series, which includes such well known elements as plutonium and americium.
Later in his career, he worked on solid-state physics, molecular physics, statistical physics, and other areas of theoretical physics.
He was known as a teacher as much as a theoretician. Doctor Wu wrote several books, best known of which are the monograph Vibrational Spectra and Structure of Polyatomic Molecules (1939) and the graduate level textbooks Quantum Mechanics (1986) and (as co-author) Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Fields (1991).
Beginning from 2002, National Science Council of Taiwan (reformed as the Ministry of Science and Technology since 2014) gives out Wu Ta-You Memorial Award every year. The Department of Physics of the University of Michigan hosts Ta-You Wu Lecture. In 2008, Asteroid 256892 Wutayou was named in honor of Doctor Ta-You Wu.