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Hua Luogeng | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Hua Luogeng in 1956 | |||||||||||||
| Born | (1910-11-12)12 November 1910 | ||||||||||||
| Died | 12 June 1985(1985-06-12) (aged 74) | ||||||||||||
| Known for | Hua's inequality Brauer–Cartan–Hua theorem Hua's lemma Hua's identity Hua's identity (Jordan algebra) | ||||||||||||
| Office | Vice Chairperson of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference | ||||||||||||
| Political party | Chinese Communist Party | ||||||||||||
| Academic background | |||||||||||||
| Education | six years ofprimary school and three years ofsecondary school | ||||||||||||
| Academic work | |||||||||||||
| Discipline | Mathematics | ||||||||||||
| Doctoral students | Chen Jingrun Pan Chengdong Wang Yuan | ||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 华罗庚 | ||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 華羅庚 | ||||||||||||
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Hua Luogeng orHua Loo-Keng[1] (Chinese:华罗庚;Wade–Giles:Hua Lo-keng; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his contributions tonumber theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in thePeople's Republic of China. He was largely responsible for identifying and nurturing the mathematicianChen Jingrun, who provedChen's theorem, the best-known result on theGoldbach conjecture. Hua's later work onmathematical optimization and operations research made an enormous impact on China's economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the USNational Academy of Sciences in 1982.[2] He was elected a member of theStanding Committee of the1st through6thNational People's Congresses, Vice-Chairman of the 6th National Committee of theChinese People's Political Consultative Conference (April 1985) and vice-chairman of theChina Democratic League (1979). He joined theChinese Communist Party in 1979.
Hua did not receive a formal university education. Although awarded several honorary PhDs, he never got a formal degree from any university. In fact, his formal education only consisted of six years ofprimary school and three years ofsecondary school. For that reason,Xiong Qinglai, after reading one of Hua's early papers, was amazed by his mathematical talent, and in 1931 invited him to study mathematics atTsinghua University.
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Hua Luogeng was born inJintan, Jiangsu on 12 November 1910. Hua's father was a small businessman. Hua met a capable math teacher in middle school who recognized his talent early and encouraged him to read advanced texts. After middle school, Hua enrolled in Chinese Vocational College inShanghai, and there he distinguished himself by winning a national abacus competition. Although tuition fees at the college were low, living costs proved too high for his means, and Hua was forced to leave a term before graduating. After failing to find a job in Shanghai, Hua returned home in 1927 to help in his father's store. In 1929, Hua contractedtyphoid fever and was in bed for half a year. The culmination of Hua's illness resulted in the partial paralysis of his left leg, which impeded his movement quite severely for the rest of his life.[1]
After middle school, Hua continued to study mathematics independently with the few books he had, and studied the entire high school and early undergraduate math curriculum. By the time Hua returned to Jintan, he was already engaged in independent mathematics research, and his first publicationSome Researches on the Theorem of Sturm, appeared in the December 1929 issue of the Shanghai periodicalScience. In the following year Hua showed in a short note in the same journal that a certain 1926 paper claiming to have solved thequintic was fundamentally flawed. Hua's lucid analysis caught the eye of Prof.Xiong Qinglai atTsinghua University inBeijing, and in 1931 Hua was invited, despite his lack of formal qualification and not without some reservations on the part of several faculty members, to join the mathematics department there.
At Tsinghua, Hua began as a clerk in the library, and then moved to become an assistant in mathematics. By September 1932, he was an instructor, and two years later, after having published another dozen papers, he was promoted to the rank of lecturer.
During 1935–36Jacques Hadamard andNorbert Wiener visited Tsinghua, and Hua eagerly attended the lectures of both and created a good impression. Wiener visited England soon afterward and spoke of Hua toG. H. Hardy. In this way Hua received an invitation to Cambridge, England, where he stayed for two years.
AtCambridge University, Hua worked on applying theHardy–Littlewood circle method to problems in number theory. He produced seminal work onWaring's problem, which established his reputation in the international math community. In 1938, after the full outbreak of theSecond Sino-Japanese War, Hua returned to China to Tsinghua, where he was appointed full professor despite having no degree. At the time, with vast areas of China under Japanese occupation,Tsinghua University,Peking University, andNankai University had merged into theSouthwest Associated University inKunming, capital of the southern provinceYunnan. In spite of the hardships of poverty, enemy bombings, and relative academic isolation from the rest of the world, Hua continued to produce first-rate mathematics. During his eight years there, Hua studiedVinogradov's seminal method of estimating trigonometric sums and reformulated it in sharper form, in what is now known universally as Vinogradov's mean value theorem. This result is central to improved versions of theHilbert–Waring theorem, and has important applications to the study of theRiemann zeta function. Hua wrote up this work in his bookletAdditive Theory of Prime Numbers, which was accepted for publication in Russia as early as 1940, but, owing to the war, did not appear in expanded form until 1947 as a monograph of theSteklov Institute. In the closing years of the Kunming period, Hua turned toalgebra andanalysis, to which he soon began to make original contributions.
After the war, Hua spent three months in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1946, atIvan Vinogradov's invitation, after which he departed for theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, New Jersey. There, Hua worked onmatrix theory, functions ofseveral complex variables, andgroup theory. At this time civil war was raging in China and it was not easy to travel, and for "convenience of travel," the Chinese authorities assigned Hua the rank of general in his passport.
In the spring of 1948, Hua accepted appointment as full professor at theUniversity of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, but his stay in Illinois was brief. In October 1949, thePeople's Republic of China was established, and Hua, wanting to be part of a new epoch, returned to China with his wife and children, despite having comfortably settled in the United States.
Back in China, Hua threw himself into educational reform and the organization of mathematical activity at the graduate level, in the schools, and among workers in the burgeoning industry. In July 1952 the Mathematical Institute of theChinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) came into being, with Hua as its first director. In 1953, he was one of a 26-member delegation from CAS to visit the Soviet Union to establish links with Russian science. Later, he was the first chair of the Department of Mathematics and Vice President ofUniversity of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of Chinese university established by CAS in 1958, aimed at fostering skilled researchers necessary for the economic development, defense and education in science and technology.
Despite his many teaching and administrative duties, Hua remained active in research and continued to write, not only on topics that had engaged him before but also in areas that were new to him or had been only lightly touched on before. In 1956, his voluminous textIntroduction to Number Theory appeared. It was later published in English bySpringer.Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains came out in 1958 and was translated into Russian in the same year, followed by an English translation by theAmerican Mathematical Society in 1963.
Outside of pure math, Hua first proposed in 1952 the development of China'selectronic computer, and in early 1953, an initial research team for this project was formed under Hua's leadership by the Mathematical Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The start of theGreat Leap Forward in 1958 came with a vehement attack on pure mathematics and intellectuals,[citation needed] prompting Hua to shift toapplied mathematics. He andWang Yuan developed a broad interest inlinear programming,operations research, andmultidimensionalnumerical integration. In connection with the last of these, the study of theMonte Carlo method and the role ofuniform distribution led them to invent an alternative deterministic method based on ideas fromalgebraic number theory. Their theory was set out inApplications of Number Theory to Numerical Analysis, which was published in 1978, and by Springer in English translation in 1981. The newfound interest inapplicable mathematics took him in the 1960s, accompanied by a team of assistants, all over China to show workers of all kinds how to apply their reasoning to shop-floor and everyday problems. Whether in ad hoc problem-solving sessions in factories or open-air teachings, he touched his audiences with the spirit of mathematics to such an extent that he became a national hero and even earned an unsolicited letter of commendation fromMao Zedong, a valuable protection in uncertain times. Hua had a commanding presence, a genial personality, and a talent for putting things simply, and his travels spread his fame and the popularity of mathematics across the land.
After theCultural Revolution, Hua resumed contact with Western mathematicians. In 1980 Hua became a cultural ambassador of China charged with re-establishing links with Western academics, and over the next five years he traveled extensively in Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1979 he was a visiting research fellow of the then Science Research Council of the United Kingdom at theUniversity of Birmingham and during 1983–84 he was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at theCalifornia Institute of Technology. He died of a heart attack at the end of a lecture he gave in Tokyo on 12 June 1985.
Hua Luogeng Park in Jintan, Jiangsu, is named after him.
