Wu Wenjun - Biography

Biography

Wu's ancestral hometown is Jiashan, in Jiaxing of Zhejiang. Wu was born in Shanghai, China where he would later graduate from Chiao Tung University (currently Xi'an Jiaotong University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in 1940. In 1945, Wu taught several months at Hangchow University (also known as Zhijiang University, 之江大学, later merged into Zhejiang University) in Hangzhou.

In 1947, he went to France for further study at the University of Strasbourg. In 1949, he received his PhD, for his thesis Sur les classes caractéristiques des structures fibrées sphériques, written under the direction of Charles Ehresmann. Afterwards, he did some work in Paris with René Thom and discovered the Wu class and Wu formula in algebraic topology. In 1951 he was appointed a post at Peking University. However, Wu may have been among a wave of recalls of Chinese academics working in the West following Chiang Kai-shek's ouster from the mainland in 1949, according to eyewitness testimony by Marcel Berger, as he one day disappeared from France without saying a word to anyone.