Su Buqing, also spelledSu Buchin (simplified Chinese:苏步青;traditional Chinese:蘇步青; September 23, 1902 – March 17, 2003), was a Chinesemathematician, educator and poet. He was the founder ofdifferential geometry in China, and served as president ofFudan University and honorary chairman of theChinese Mathematical Society.[1][2]
Su was born inPingyang County,Zhejiang Province in 1902, with ancestry fromQuanzhou.
Su's academic journey began in 1911 when he transferred to the First Primary School in Pingyang County and was subsequently admitted to the Zhejiang Provincial Tenth Middle School in 1914. In 1919, Su was offered a scholarship by the principal of his middle school to study inJapan. Su successfully passed the entrance examination for Tokyo Higher Technical College in February 1920 and enrolled in the Department of Electrical Engineering where he graduated from in March 1924. After that, he was admitted to the Department of Mathematics ofTohoku Imperial University in Japan and graduated in 1927. Under the supervision of Tadahiko Kubota, Su received his Ph.D. from the university in 1931 for dissertation entitledThe relation between affine and projective differential geometry.[3]
During his time in Tohoku Imperial University, Su met and married Yonako Matsumoto in 1928.
After returning to China, he first served as a professor and dean atZhejiang University (he established theChen-Su School withChen Jiangong). When universities across China underwent reorganization in 1952, Su and his students from Zhejiang University's Department of Mathematics relocated toFudan University where he initially served as the Provost and later became the honorary President of Fudan University in 1978.
He was honorary chairman of theChinese Mathematical Society (CMS) and elected toAcademia Sinica and theChinese Academy of Sciences in 1948 and 1955 respectively.
In 1985, the Propaganda Department of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee appointed Su as the honorary President ofWenzhou University. Additionally, he provided guidance and supervision in the establishment of the Shanghai Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1989 and theChina Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM) in 1990, serving as a consultant for the latter.
Some other positions Su held included member of the sixth (1983–88) and later vice chairman of the seventh and eighth (1988–98) National Committee of theChinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), honorary chairman of theChina Democratic League Central Committee (1997), and Conference and deputy to theNational People's Congress (NPC).
Praised commonly in mathematical field as the "first geometer in the orient",[3] Su was engaged in research, teaching and education indifferential geometry andcomputational geometry. In his early years, he made excellent contributions toaffine differential geometry andprojective differential geometry. He obtained extraordinary achievements in general space differential geometry, conjugating net theory in higher-dimensional space and computer aided geometry design.
Su's research on general surfaces led to the discovery of quartic algebraic surfaces of the third order. In recognition of his achievements, a geometric shape known as the "Su-cone" was named after him. In the 1940s, he made notable contributions to the theory of K-spreads, involving families of K-dimensional manifolds in space.
Throughout his career, Su authored over 160 mathematical papers published in both domestic and international journals.[4] He also wrote more than 20 monographs and textbooks on topics such as projective curves, projective surfaces, and affine differential geometry. Su's main papers are included inSelected Works of Buqing Su (1991). Notable among his works are "The General Projective Theory of Curves," (English translation 1958) "Affine Differential Geometry," (English translation 1983) and "Computational Geometry, Curve and Surface Modeling," (Chinese 1980; English edition 1989) co-authored with Dingyuan Liu.
Su won the second prize of the firstNational Natural Science Award in 1956 for his work on "Geometry of K-spread Space and General Metric Space, Projective Curve Theory."
In 1978, his work,A Program of Hull Lofting, won the National Science Conference Award.
Su won the second prize of the firstNational Science and Technology Progress Award in 1985 for his collaborative effort on "A Production Process of the Hull Form by the Curved-Surface Method."
In 2001, the book,Geometry and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, which presents the proceedings of a conference on geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations, dedicated to Su in honor of his one-hundredth birthday.[5]
In August 2003, theInternational Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) established the "ICIAM Su Buqing Award" in recognition to contributions to the application of mathematics in economic growth and human development. Furthermore, the Chinese Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM) established the "CSIAM Su Buqing Applied Mathematics Award" in 2004.
Asteroid297161 Subuchin, discovered by astronomers of thePMO NEO Survey Program in 2008, was named in his memory.[2] The officialnaming citation was published by theMinor Planet Center on 8 November 2019 (M.P.C. 118221).[6]
