His uncle was the historian Ch'ien Mu. After graduating from Tsinghua University in 1935, he entered its Graduate School and became an intern researcher at the National Central Research Institute under the guidance of Wu Youxun. He obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto under the supervision of John Lighton Synge in 1942, and then worked as a research associate in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech.