Luogeng Hua

Background

Hua Luogeng was born in 1910 in Jintan, a town in southern Jiangsu Province in eastern China. In 1910 Jintan was still a small community, and his father managed a general store there with uneven success. The family’s limited means meant that he did not receive a formal education in his early years.

The opening of Jintan Middle School in 1922, just as he completed elementary school, gave him access to further schooling. The school’s mathematics teacher was well qualified and demanding, and he recognized Hua’s talent and encouraged its development.

After middle school, Hua attended the China Vocational School in Shanghai, then one of China’s largest commercial and industrial cities, but he left after about a year. He then worked as a trainee in a provision shop and, after failing to find a position in Shanghai, returned to Jintan to help in his father’s store.

Education

Hua did not receive a formal university education, and his university records reflect academic appointments and study periods rather than a degree. Much of his advanced mathematical training was self-directed, through independent reading and study conducted in the evenings.

Tsinghua University, founded in 1911 with funds from the American Boxer Indemnity remission, was one of the leading institutions in Beijing during the 1930s. Hua first worked there as a library clerk and then as an assistant in the mathematics department, after Xiong Qinglai, the department’s dean, invited him to join the university.

In 1936 Hua went to Cambridge University in England, one of the oldest universities in the English-speaking world. There he applied the Hardy–Littlewood circle method, developed by G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood, to problems in number theory.

After returning to China in 1938, he joined the Southwest Associated University in Kunming. This wartime consortium had been formed by Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University after the Japanese invasion of China.

Career

Hua’s first publication, Some Researches on the Theorem of Sturm, appeared in the December 1929 issue of Science, a Shanghai periodical, and in 1930 he published a paper on the solution of certain algebraic equations. These papers drew the attention of Xiong Qinglai, who invited him to work at Tsinghua University, first as a librarian and then as a teaching assistant and lecturer. In 1934 Hua also worked as a researcher at the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture.

From 1936 to 1938 Hua was a visiting scholar at Cambridge, where his research on the circle method produced his Additive Theory of Prime Numbers. The manuscript was accepted for publication in Russia in 1940, but the war delayed its expanded appearance as a monograph of the Steklov Institute until 1947. Chinese sources date the completion of the work to 1942.

He became a professor at the Southwest Associated University in 1938 and remained there until 1946. In the spring of 1946 he spent three months in the Soviet Union, where he worked on matrix theory, functions of several complex variables and group theory. He then went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as a researcher from 1946 to 1948. Founded in 1930, the institute was devoted to advanced research without regular teaching duties.

In 1948 Hua accepted appointment as a full professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He returned to China in 1950 and resumed teaching in the mathematics department of Tsinghua University. In 1951 he became head of the Institute of Mathematics of Academia Sinica, China’s principal national academy of research in the sciences.

In the early 1960s he applied mathematical methods to production, improving manufacturing procedures and organizational planning, and led a team that promoted two new methods in more than twenty provinces and municipalities. Hua died of a heart attack on 12 June 1985 in Tokyo, during a lecture tour in Japan.

Achievements

• Hua refined the Hardy–Littlewood circle method and Vinogradov’s methods to obtain an upper bound on the number of terms needed to express every sufficiently large integer as a sum of powers of primes. This work belongs to the Waring–Goldbach problem, which he initiated in 1938.

• Several mathematical results carry his name, including Hua’s inequality, Hua’s lemma, Hua’s identity and the Brauer–Cartan–Hua theorem.

• His monograph on the harmonic analysis of functions of several complex variables in the classical domains became one of the most influential works of modern Chinese harmonic analysis. It remained a useful reference on Cartan domains decades after its publication.

• He applied mathematical optimization and overall planning to improving production methods and management, and he led a team that promoted two new methods in more than twenty provinces and municipalities. In 1964 Mao Zedong wrote a letter supporting his proposal on the critical path method and program evaluation and review technique.

• Chinese sources describe him as a founder and pioneer of many fields of mathematics research in the People’s Republic and credit him with more than 200 theses and monographs.

Works

More photos

• monograph

  • Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains

    (English translation of the Chinese original published by ...)

    1963
  • Additive Theory of Prime Numbers

    (Monograph on the additive theory of prime numbers, derive...)

    1965
  • Introduction to Number Theory

    (Textbook published by Springer-Verlag in 1982 and based o...)

    1982

Politics

Hua Luogeng’s public life unfolded in the People’s Republic of China after 1949, when the Communist Party led the government and scientific institutions were reorganized to serve national construction. Within that framework, his mathematical work was increasingly directed toward economic and industrial goals rather than purely academic pursuits.

In the early 1960s he applied mathematical optimization and overall planning to production and management, and his proposals attracted national attention. In 1964 Mao Zedong wrote a letter supporting his proposal on the critical path method and program evaluation and review technique in industrial management.

Contemporary accounts describe Hua as a leader of mathematics research and education in the People’s Republic, a role that connected his scholarship with state programs for scientific and economic development.

Membership

Hua was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the national research academy whose predecessor, Academia Sinica, elected him to membership after his return to China. He also served as a fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences, which was founded in Trieste in 1983 to support scientific research in developing countries.

He was the first Chinese member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a learned society founded in 1780 that honors scholars and leaders across many disciplines.

• Academician

  Chinese Academy of Sciences , China

• Fellow

  Third World Academy of Sciences

• First Chinese member

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• English mathematician Harry Bateman praised Hua as “China’s Einstein” and said he deserved membership in any famous science academy.

Connections

Hua married Xiaoguan Wu in 1922. Their daughter Shun was born in 1923 and their son Jundong in 1931. Two more sons, Ling and Guang, and a daughter, Su, followed, and a further daughter, Mi, was born a little later.

Wife:

Xiaoguan Wu

Married Hua in 1922.

References

• Hua Loo-Keng (1910 - 1985) - Biography - MacTutor History of Mathematics Detailed biography covering Hua’s early life in Jintan, his work at Tsinghua University and Cambridge, and his later career in China and abroad.
• Hua Luogeng: An Outstanding Chinese Mathematician Encyclopedia biography from the CPC Encyclopedia that emphasizes his contributions to Chinese mathematics and his applied work in industry and planning.
  2011
• Hua Luogeng (1910 - 1985) Encyclopedia entry describing Hua’s early education, his academic appointments in China and his death in Tokyo in 1985.
  2018
• Hua Luogeng Reference article on Hua’s contributions to number theory, his role in Chinese mathematics research and education, and the results associated with his name.