Chien-Shiung Wu died in New York City, closing a career that reshaped understanding of beta decay and parity violation.
Chien-Shiung Wu died on February 16, 1997, in New York, New York, at the age of 84, following a stroke. By the time of her death, she was widely recognized as one of the greatest experimental physicists of the twentieth century, often called the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie", and the "Queen of Nuclear Research."
Her death marked the end of a career spanning over five decades, during which she made foundational contributions to nuclear and particle physics, including her landmark 1956–57 experiment disproving the conservation of parity in weak interactions—a discovery that earned her collaborators Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, though Wu herself, controversially, was not included in that award.
Following her death, tributes poured in from institutions worldwide, including Columbia University where she had spent most of her career, and from the Chinese-American scientific community for whom she remained an enduring symbol of achievement against discrimination based on both gender and ethnicity.
Her ashes were interred at the Ming De School courtyard in Liuhe, the same school her father had founded, symbolically returning her to the roots of the educational values that shaped her life. Her legacy continues through the Wu Chien-Shiung Education Foundation, numerous named lectureships, and her enduring reputation as a meticulous, rigorous experimentalist whose work fundamentally altered the understanding of the physical universe.