Wu Zhonghua
Wu Zhonghua was born in Shanghai, China on July 27th, 1917 and is the Chinese Physicist. At the age of 75, Wu Zhonghua biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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In late 1943, Wu won Tsinghua University's Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study in the United States. He and his wife were both accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Ph.D. students and began their studies in 1944. He specialized in the internal combustion engine. Li gave birth to two sons in the US, and the couple took turns taking classes and looking after the children.
Wu earned his Ph.D. in 1947, and Li hers a year later. They both joined the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics after graduation. In 1950, he pioneered the three-dimensional flow theory, which was considered by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as one of the two most important breakthroughs of the 1950s in the development of turbomachinery, together with the invention of computers.
With the outbreak of the Korean War, Sino-American relations turned openly hostile, and Wu and Li decided they could no longer work for the US military. They resigned from NACA and became professors at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1951. In 1954, they resolved to return to China. To avoid suspicion of the US government, the family flew to Britain in August for vacation, and travelled to China through Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, arriving at the end of the year.
Career in China
In Beijing, Wu was appointed professor and deputy head of the Mechanics Department of Tsinghua University, and established China's first turbomachinery program at Tsinghua in 1956. The following year, he established a research lab in turboengines and internal combustion at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was elected as an academician of the CAS in 1957. When the University of Science and Technology of China was established in 1958, he served as the head of the Department of Physics and Thermal Engineering.
Because of his outspoken criticism of the Great Leap Forward, he was denounced in 1958 as a "right-leaning" academic. He was politically rehabilitated the following year and appointed Deputy Director of the Institute of Mechanics of the CAS in 1960. His research program was among the many cancelled during the Great Famine. In the ensuing Socialist Education Movement, he was sent to perform manual work in rural Hongtong County in Shanxi for three years. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wu was protected by Premier Zhou Enlai and PLA Air Force officers who valued his scientific contributions. He survived the turmoil unscathed, but his research was completely stopped until 1971, when the initial chaos of the revolution subsided.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979, Wu led a group of Chinese scientists to visit the United States for the first time since he returned to China in 1954. In 1980, the CAS established the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics (IET), with Wu as its founding director.
Wu won the State Natural Science Award (Second Class) in 1957 and 1982. He was awarded the Major Discovery Prize by the CAS in 1975, and the Gold Award from the China Mechanical Engineering Association. From 1981 to 1992, he served as an executive chairman of the CAS. He was elected to the Standing Committee of the 6th and 7th National People's Congress, and served from 1983 until his death in 1992.