Vincent Yuan

He was born in Princeton in 1947; the biographical memoir of Chien-Shiung Wu published by the National Academy of Sciences also records his other name, Wei-Cheng Yuan.⁠[1][2]

The National Academy of Sciences memoir states that by 1946 his father was working as a research associate at Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry, while his mother had moved to New York and returned to Princeton on weekends.⁠[1]

His daughter, Jada YuanJada YuanJada Yuan is a journalist who was a contributing editor at New York magazine, served in 2018 as the first “52 Places Traveler” of The New York Times and was afterward a reporter at The Washington Post until February 2026; she is a granddaughter of the physicists Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan.Open the full entry, sets down in her 2021 essay a story that she has often heard: that when he was born, a friend who came to see his mother in the hospital was Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born physicist who formulated the special theory of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1915 and received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. From 1933 until his death he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.Open the full entry. He himself, she writes, cannot confirm it.⁠[2]

His daughter writes in an essay published in 2021 that he was in first grade when he first started boarding school.⁠[2]

The essay relates that when the stamp was being released a reporter got in touch with him and asked about his mother, and that he copied his daughter on his answers, which she found more candid than he had ever been with her. He replied that his mother worked long hours in the laboratory and came home late at night: “She took care of me, but she needed to do her work”; she made sure that his homework was done but did not micromanage. He also wrote: “We didn’t have much in common as far as fun went,” and “Her work was her life and her fun.”⁠[2]

The essay adds a story that he said he had learned about his own childhood from reading about his mother: students in her laboratory once bought two circus tickets for mother and son, hoping to draw her away from work for a couple of hours; she left, was back within half an hour, smiling broadly, and announced that she need not go after all because the nursemaid had agreed to take him.⁠[2]

The essay states that through the fall of 1956 his mother went back and forth between New York and Washington to use the laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards while continuing to teach her classes at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry, and that in those months his father and a nanny looked after him; he was 9.⁠[2]

His daughter writes that former students of his mother recalled an evening when one of them gently reminded her that it might be time to go home and give her son his dinner, since he kept telephoning the laboratory to complain that he was hungry; she answered that he knew where the can opener was, and went on working.⁠[2]

The release that Columbia University issued in 1997 states that his parents had lived for more than 50 years in the same apartment near Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.⁠[3]

His daughter writes that he is American-born and that Chinese is a language which he and she have heard all their lives but can seldom follow.⁠[2]

He graduated from Columbia College in 1967 and received a doctorate in physics from Columbia University in 1977.⁠[3][4][2]

His daughter writes that in the 1960s he wore his hair long and belonged to the counterculture, and that his mother felt he did not study hard enough.⁠[2]

She writes that she had always wondered why he went into physics, in such large footsteps, and whether it was pressure or a need to bond with his mother through her greatest passion; he said to her recently that none of this had ever occurred to him. What he liked, she writes, was being “a detective of science,” working in a world that had right answers which a good experiment could prove.⁠[2]

She writes that his mother was not overjoyed when he fell in love with her own mother, Lucy Lyon, who was then, in her words, a hippie with long blond hair, “very much not Chinese,” and who later became a glass artist.⁠[2]

Chien-Shiung Wu died on February 16, 1997; the release that Columbia University issued on her death states that he was then living in Albuquerque, New MexicoNew MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States. Its capital is Santa Fe and its largest city is Albuquerque. It was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912, as the 47th state, and had a population of 2,117,522 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and was a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.⁠[3][1]

The release states that his mother died on the afternoon of Sunday, February 16, in Manhattan, at the age of 84; his father, Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, whom the release describes as a retired experimental physicist of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, said that she had suffered a stroke almost two years earlier and another that day. His daughter writes that on that day her roommate at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry said that her mother had called 20 times.⁠[3][2]

In 2000 Physical Review C published a paper of the TRIPLE Collaboration on parity violation in neutron resonances of thorium-232, which extended the analysis to neutron energies from 250 to 1,900 electron volts; he was one of the authors listed with Los Alamos National Laboratory.⁠[5]

The abstract states that the ten statistically significant parity violations below 250 electron volts all have the same sign, whereas at higher energies violations of both signs appeared in the transmission of longitudinally polarized neutrons through a thick thorium target.⁠[5]

The biographical memoir of Chien-Shiung Wu states that she was proud of the intellectual development of her son, who as a physicist also worked on parity nonconservation in compound nuclei.⁠[1]

On April 5, 2004, he traveled from the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry with his wife and daughter to Taicang, Jiangsu, for the interment of his father’s ashes, and placed the urn in the grave himself.⁠[6]

The China News Service dispatch states that the interment began at 10:30 a.m. and was attended by more than 300 people, among them representatives of the Jiangsu provincial overseas Chinese affairs office and federation of returned overseas Chinese, Nanjing University, Southeast University and Henan University, officials of Xiangcheng in Henan, his father’s hometown, and of Suzhou and Taicang, friends and relatives of his parents, and teachers and students of the Mingde school; his father was laid in the same cylindrical marble tomb as his mother, beneath a crape myrtle tree in the Wu Chien-Shiung memorial cemetery, whose construction his father had supervised.⁠[6]

On March 30, 2005, Physical Review Letters published the paper “Shock Temperature Measurement Using Neutron Resonance Spectroscopy,” of which he was first author; the seven other authors were likewise at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the paper had been received on September 3, 2004.⁠[7]

In the experiment an explosively driven aluminum flyer produced a planar shock in a molybdenum target containing a 1-millimeter layer doped with 1.7 atomic percent of tungsten-182; a single neutron pulse probed the shocked sample, and the Doppler broadening of the 21.1-electron-volt neutron resonance of tungsten-182 gave the temperature of molybdenum compressed to 63 gigapascals.⁠[7]

Physical Review Focus, published by the American Physical Society, described the experiment by him, David Funk, Charles Ragan and colleagues under the title “The Temperature in the Crunch”: an aluminum plate was accelerated by an explosion to 3.6 kilometers per second, the detector stood some 23 meters behind the sample, and the temperature of the shock wave was 875 kelvins.⁠[8]

The article explains that shock experiments are vital to weapons design and can simulate the hot, dense cores of planets, but that the temperature of a shock wave has been hard to measure: optical pyrometry works for translucent materials, and for opaque ones gives only the temperature of the surface, which is generally lower. The Los Alamos researchers instead sent a burst of low-energy neutrons deep into the material: the molybdenum plate held a thin layer of tungsten–molybdenum alloy, tungsten nuclei absorb neutrons only within a certain range of speeds, and that range widens as the temperature rises; they measured the speeds of the unabsorbed neutrons from their arrival times at the detector and compared the result with an unshocked sample. The article gives the speed of the aluminum plate as 11 times the speed of sound and says that the method could help determine a material’s equation of state, with uses in weapons research, planetary science and condensed-matter physics.⁠[8]

In that article Yogendra Gupta, director of the Institute for Shock Physics at Washington State University, called the method “elegant, no question,” and Sarah Stewart of Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry called it “very promising” while adding that it “must be validated on another material.”⁠[8]

Yogendra Gupta added that the researchers should run additional checks to confirm the method’s accuracy. The article refers to the paper as appearing in the April 1 Physical Review Letters; its author, Adrian Cho, is a freelance science writer in Grosse Pointe Woods, MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

The meetings archive of the American Physical Society lists, under its April 2006 meeting, his invited talk “Chien-Shiung Wu as a Person and a Scientist,” given with the affiliation Los Alamos National Laboratory; the abstract says that he would discuss his view of her from his vantage point as her son.⁠[9]

A paper dated June 29, 2007, by Damian C. Swift, Achim Seifter, David B. Holtkamp, Vincent W. Yuan, David Bowman and David A. Clark, all of Los Alamos National Laboratory, states that the temperatures obtained by neutron resonance spectroscopy in the molybdenum shock experiments were significantly higher than predicted on the assumption of ideal hydrodynamic loading.⁠[10]

The authors estimated that plastic flow contributed a temperature rise of 53 kelvins compared with hydrodynamic flow, and that spatial variations in loading, which arose because the projectile was significantly curved on impact and still accelerating, raised the apparent temperature deduced from the width of the neutron resonance by 160 kelvins.⁠[10]

In 2012 he traveled to China with his family for the centennial celebrations that the local government organized for Chien-Shiung Wu.⁠[2]

His daughter writes that the three of them flew to Shanghai and drove about an hour north to Liuhe, where his mother was raised. At the unveiling of a statue of his mother, relatives led them to the front of a great expanse of folding chairs; during the speeches, which were in Chinese and not translated, she caught his name, and a relative whom she calls her uncle signaled urgently for them to stand and wave. In an opera whose program bore the title “Chien-Shiung Wu,” a small boy played him; in one scene the actress in the role of his mother struck the boy so hard that he fell down in tears, and at the scene of his mother’s arrival in America his daughter looked over at him and found him asleep.⁠[2]

In a technical report dated January 30, 2018 (LA-UR-18-20686), Juan C. Fernández, Cris W. Barnes, Michael J. Mocko and Lukas Zavorka of Los Alamos National Laboratory describe his 2005 paper as the pioneering dynamic measurement of temperature by neutron resonance spectroscopy and write: “Yuan chose the 21 eV resonance to reduce the transit time for their dynamic experiment.”⁠[11]

The report states that the experiment used a custom setup in the Blue Room at LANSCE, which was required because the source and geometry of the Lujan Center were not suitable for the measurement; the neutrons came from the beam of the proton storage ring directed at a spallation target, and the custom setup gave a neutron pulse 170 nanoseconds long; the detector stood 23 meters from the sample, 6.4 times the optimal distance of 3.6 meters that the report calculates. The report estimates that only about 1,000 neutrons reached the detector over the width of the resonance, whereas by its own calculation a temperature accurate to 1 percent requires more than 20,000.⁠[11]

His daughter writes that the United States Postal Service asked the family, in an email marked “Confidential,” whether it would support including Chien-Shiung Wu in the Distinguished Americans stamp series; of the many requests of this kind that he receives as executor of his mother’s estate, she writes, this is the only one she has seen him answer at once. She adds that the family still does not know who put his mother’s name forward or how she came to be chosen.⁠[2]

On February 11, 2021, the United States Postal Service dedicated the Chien-Shiung Wu Forever stamp in a virtual ceremony, in which he took part with Kristin Seaver, the agency’s chief retail and delivery officer and executive vice president, his daughter Jada Yuan, and Brian GreeneBrian GreeneBrian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University who works on superstring theory; he is known for popular-science books such as The Elegant Universe and the NOVA documentaries adapted from them, and he co-founded the World Science Festival with his wife, Tracy Day.Open the full entry, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University; the release identifies him as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.⁠[12]

The release carries his statement. He said, “I am elated to have my mother honored by USPS on a postage stamp,” because it goes beyond recognizing her scientific achievements and also honors the determination and moral qualities that she embodied; he added that it is even more profound that the recognition comes from America, the country of her naturalization, which she loved.⁠[12]

An article written by Los Alamos National Laboratory on the stamp and posted on the website of the U.S. Department of Energy on February 12, 2021, states that he was working in the laboratory’s Applied and Fundamental Physics group and had recently given a talk about his mother to the laboratory’s Atomic Women group.⁠[13][14]

In that article he says that his mother embodied the values of hard work, not sweeping problems under the rug and seeing the bigger picture, and that she applied them to her work and to her students.⁠[13]

The article adds that Bob King, acting group leader in his division, had worked with him for years and had only recently learned that his colleague’s mother was a famous physicist; he said that he had not been keeping the connection secret and added: “your real successes are what you do yourself, not based on someone else.”⁠[13]

A Columbia News article on the stamp, dated February 10, 2021, quotes his recollections of his mother, among them “What was important to her was her research and her students”; he added that she preferred to downplay her own achievements and focus on those of others.⁠[4]

The article calls him Vincent “Vinny” Yuan and says that he appears in the video with which the United States Postal Service unveiled the portrait on February 11; in it he says, “We’re very honored,” and “Like anybody, you’re proud of your mother.”⁠[13]

The version of the same article on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s own site, discover.lanl.gov, differs in wording: it calls him “also a physicist,” says that he appears in the video at 6 minutes 35 seconds and that in it he recalls how dismayed his mother was that opportunities for women in science were so limited, places the talk to the Atomic Women “A number of years ago,” and says that otherwise he has rarely mentioned the connection to colleagues, not wanting to ride on his mother’s fame.⁠[15]

NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News’s article on the stamp calls him a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and quotes him: “She would always mention that the number of women in senior faculty member positions was very limited”; he said that his mother thought this unfair and thought it terrible that, with opportunities limited, women could not have the same ambitions and hopes that men could.⁠[16]

The Columbia News article states that if his mother was disappointed at missing the Nobel PrizeNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is an international award established under the will of Alfred Nobel, comprising five prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, awarded since 1901; its funds are managed by the Nobel Foundation, whose Board is based in Stockholm. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968, is not a Nobel Prize.Open the full entry she never spoke about it, at least not to him; he said, “Not calling attention to herself was also part of her nature,” and “Humility is very much part of Chinese culture,” and that his mother was happy with the recognition she received later in life.⁠[4]

He is the only child of Chien-Shiung Wu.⁠[2]

His daughter, Jada Yuan, is a journalist; in her long essay about her grandmother, published in The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry on December 13, 2021, she writes that he, then 74, was still working on classified nuclear physics projects and that he is the executor of his mother’s estate.⁠[2][14]

The release that Columbia University issued in 1997 states that his parents met at BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry and were married in 1942.⁠[3]

Jada Yuan writes that she is the only grandchild of Chien-Shiung Wu and that her mother is Lucy Lyon. The Santa Fe New Mexican’s profile of Jada Yuan in May 2018 states that she was born in Los Alamos, where he works as a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that Lucy Lyon is a glass artist who exhibits at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.⁠[2][17]

Jada Yuan writes: “The bomb in many ways brought my family to New Mexico.” By her account she grew up partly in Los Alamos and partly in a rural valley, and his mother came to see the family there only once, when her granddaughter was a baby. She also writes that the three of them traveled to New York twice a year, mostly during school breaks, to visit his parents, and that he and Lucy Lyon kept his mother informed of their daughter’s schoolwork and of her progress on the violin.⁠[2][14]

The Santa Fe New Mexican states that on at least a couple of occasions when Jada Yuan was young the family loaded camping gear into the black cargo van that Lucy Lyon used to haul artwork and set out for Mexico to see how far it would get before breaking down; on one trip the van overheated 100 miles south of the border, leaving the family stranded until someone with a tow truck came by, and they went from one backyard mechanic to the next before reaching the beach.⁠[17]

In her 2021 essay Jada Yuan writes that, as executor of his mother’s estate, he gets many requests and is, in her words, “bad about responding,” so that admirers of his mother often turn to her as a last resort and ask whether she can get him to write back; that his access to a personal computer is limited and that he mostly uses it to check on her, the New York KnicksNew York KnicksThe New York Knicks are an NBA basketball team based at Madison Square Garden in New York and owned by MSG Sports.Open the full entry and the Cleveland BrownsCleveland BrownsThe Cleveland Browns are an NFL professional American football team that began play in the AAFC in 1946 and joined the NFL in 1950. They won four AAFC and four NFL championships. After suspending play from 1996 through 1998, the franchise resumed in 1999 with its name, colors and history retained. Its current home is Huntington Bank Field in Cleveland.Open the full entry; and that he says his mother would have wanted her work to speak for itself.⁠[2]

On an NPR program Jada Yuan said that his mother knew how to wait wryly before she spoke and that he has the same quality: he stays quiet, lets the information play out in front of him and then comes up with a “zinger”; she also said that writing the essay allowed her to be in conversation with him about his memories of his mother.⁠[18]

Descriptions of his profession vary: Columbia University’s 1997 release calls him a research scientist, the United States Postal Service and the Los Alamos National Laboratory article call him a scientist, the version of that article on the laboratory’s own site also calls him a physicist, and the Santa Fe New Mexican, Columbia News, NBC News and his daughter’s essay call him a nuclear physicist.⁠[3][12][13][15][17][4][16][2]

Los Alamos National Laboratory: Official website: https://www.lanl.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]