Theodore Y. Wu

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

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

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 among other things with biological applications of hydrodynamics ( the flight of birds, swimming fish ) and hydrodynamics of water waves.

In 1993 he received the hydrodynamics Prize of the American Physical Society, and in 2004 the Von Karman medal. 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.

1982 to 2001 he was co-editor of Advances in Applied Mechanics.

Writings

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