Because of the Japanese invasion (the Second Sino-Japanese War), Wang's family had to move away from Zhejiang Province, and finally arrived at the southeast city Kunming in Yunnan in 1938.

1942, Wang's father rose to the position of Chief Secretary of the Academia Sinica.

In 1978, Wang was back to his professorship, in the Institute of Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Wang advised Shou-Wu Zhang when he studied at the Chinese Academy of Sciences for his master's degree from 1983 to 1986.

Their work came to the attention of the statistician Kai-Tai Fang, who realized that their results could be used in the design of experiments.

In particular, their results could be used to investigate interaction, for example, in factorial experiments and response surface methodology.