Born in Shanghai, he studied electrical engineering at University of Minnesota and became a William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition fellow (1953).^[1] He obtained an S.M. (1954) and Ph.D. (1956) in applied physics from Harvard University. His thesis concerned I. The Concept of Impedance II. High Frequency Scattering and was advised by Ronold W. P. King.^[2] At Harvard, he continued as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (1956–59), joined the faculty of applied physics (1959) and is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics & Professor of Physics. Wu has also had visiting appointments with Rockefeller University (1966), at the DESY in Hamburg, Germany (1971), at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and Utrecht University (1977).

He has studied statistical mechanics on Bose–Einstein condensation in an external potential, classical electromagnetic theory (1960). With Hung Cheng, he used gauge quantum field theory to predict the unboundedly increasing total scattering cross sections at very high energies, experimentally verified at CERN and Tevatron collider. Wu studied production processes for the Large Hadron Collider, in particular to predict the production cross section of a Higgs particle with low momentum together with two forward jets. His studies with Chen Ning Yang include CP violation, globalization of the gauge theory,^[3] and the Wu–Yang dictionary. More recently, Wu has studied quantum information processing based on the Schrödinger equation without any spatial dimension in the modeling and application of quantum memories.^[4]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1977
• Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, 1980
• The Humboldt Prize, 1985
• Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics with Barry M. McCoy and Alexander Zamolodchikov, 1999^[5]

• The Scattering and Diffraction of Waves (Harvard University Press, 1959). With Ronold W. P. King.
• The two-dimensional Ising model (Harvard University Press, 1973). With Barry M. McCoy
• Expanding Protons: Scattering at High Energies (MIT Press, 1987). With Hung Cheng
• The Ubiquitous Photon: Helicity Methods for QED and QCD (Oxford University Press, 1990). With Raymond Gastmans
• Lateral Electromagnetic Waves: Theory and Applications to Communications, Geophysical Exploration, and Remote Sensing (Springer-Verlag, 1992). With Ronold W. P. King and Margaret Owens

• Wu-Yang monopole