Hua Luogeng
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Hua Luogeng | |
---|---|
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 of primary school and three years of secondary school |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Mathematics |
Doctoral students | Chen Jingrun Pan Chengdong Wang Yuan |
Chinese name | |
Hanyu Pinyin | Huà Luógēng |
Gwoyeu Romatzyh | Huah Luogeng |
Wade–Giles | Hua4 Lo2-Keng1 |
IPA | [xwâ lwǒkə́ŋ] |
Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng (
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 of primary school and three years of secondary school. For that reason, Xiong Qinglai, after reading one of Hua's early papers, was amazed by Hua's mathematical talent, and in 1931 Xiong invited him to study mathematics at Tsinghua University
Biography
Early years (1910–1936)
Hua Luogeng was born in
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 publication Some Researches on the Theorem of Sturm, appeared in the December 1929 issue of the Shanghai periodical Science. In the following year Hua showed in a short note in the same journal that a certain 1926 paper claiming to have solved the
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 1935–36 Jacques Hadamard and Norbert 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 to G. H. Hardy. In this way Hua received an invitation to come to Cambridge, England, where he stayed for two years.
Early middle years (1936–1950)
While at
In the spring of 1948, Hua accepted appointment as full professor at the
Later career in China (1950–1985)
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 the
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 text, Introduction to Number Theory, appeared, and later it was published in English by Springer. 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 the American Mathematical Society in 1963.
Outside of pure math, Hua first proposed in 1952 the development of China's
The start of the
Following the Cultural 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 during the next five years he travelled 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 the University of Birmingham and during 1983–84 he was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California 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 has been named after him.
Works
- Additive Theory of Prime Numbers (Translations of Mathematical Monographs : Vol 13). Amer Mathematical Society. 1966. ISBN 978-0-8218-1563-2.
- Introduction to Number Theory. Springer. 1987. ISBN 978-3-540-10818-4.
- Hua, Loo-keng (1981). Starting with the Unit Circle: Background to Higher Analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-90589-1.
- Loo-keng Hua: Selected Papers. Berlin: Springer Verlag. 1983. ISBN 978-0-387-90744-4.
References
- ISBN 9783662079836
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png)
- Hua Luogeng at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hua Luogeng", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Biographical memoir – by Heini Halberstam
- Biography of Loo-Keng Hua – from MacTutor History of Mathematics from University of St Andrews
- Hua Loo-Keng : a biography by Wang Yuan
- Heini Halberstam, "Loo-Keng Hua", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2002)