深切缅怀吴院士，精神永存，安徽定远籍力学所马秀忠堂侄祝你老人家一路走好。

Rest in peace, Professor Wu. Thank you for the knowledge and enlightenment you have bequeathed us, and be assured that we will carry on your legacy with gratitude and honor.

The above work is of course only a fraction of the mountain of contributions that Professor Wu had made in the broad landscape of thermal sciences. His mastery of the subjects and his creativity in blazing new paths are legendary in the global scientific community. Through our association, I have also come to admire him as a scholar and gentleman. His mild manner and sincere modesty have forever inspired us all – not just how to be a scholar, but also how to live with grace.

For example, it allows the determination of the critical states of extinction and flammability limits of combustible mixtures, the meaningful extraction of chemical kinetic information from laminar flame speed data, and the systematic formulation of complex fuel blends. Indeed, modern combustion research and literature are permeated with advances that can be traced in one form or another to the information acquired through such stretch-free flame data.

By recognizing the essential role of aerodynamic stretch and differential species diffusion on the structure and dynamic of flames, the study beautifully demonstrated that stretch-free flame speeds could be determined by systematically subtracting out of their influence. This work, published in a well-cited paper in 1985, “On the determination of laminar flame speeds from stretched flames” in the Proceedings of the Twentieth International Symposium on Combustion, opened a flood gate in the systematic and meaningful study of flames and the embedded chemical kinetics.