Tai Tsun Wu (1933-2024)

Dear Colleagues,

I learned today from Sau Lan Wu that Tai Tsun Wu passed away in Palo Alto, California, at 10:48pm, on July 19, 2024. Tai was a formidable faculty member of both the Harvard physics department and SEAS. He was known for his groundbreaking research in both perturbative quantum field theory and in statistical physics. Tai’s doctoral thesis, written with Professor Ronald King at Harvard when he was only 22 years old established him as an extraordinary master of antenna theory for electromagnetic waves.

During his subsequent productive career, Tai pursued a long collaboration with Hung Cheng at MIT. They studied the high-energy behavior of Feynman diagrams in quantum field theory, reflecting properties of renormalization theory. Tai’s work on statistical mechanics models with Barry McCoy, Craig Tracy and others led to many insights, including the closed-form solution for correlation functions of the scaling limit of the Ising model in two dimensions, ostensibly an exact quantum field theory. Tai had many graduate students and collaborators. He was a regular visitor in the CERN theory group, recently working on theoretical aspects of the Higgs particle discovery. Tai Wu received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, the Humboldt Foundation Prize, and he was a member of the Academia Sinica.

Tai married Sau Lan Yu, a graduate student in the Harvard physics department and later Enrico Fermi Professor at the University of Wisconsin. Sau Lan played a central role in the discovery of the J/psi particle and In many experiments at CERN. The Wu family spent much time both in Cambridge and in Geneva. In 2023 they sold their Cambridge house and moved to Palo Alto.

Arthur Jaffe

July 23, 2024