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Loo-Keng Hua

Born: 12 Nov 1910 in Jintan, Jiangsu Province, China
Died: 12 June 1985 in Tokyo, Japan

Loo-Keng Hua (华罗庚) was one of the leading mathematicians of his time and one of the two most eminent Chinese mathematicians of his generation, S S Chern being the other. He spent most of his working life in China during some of that country's most turbulent political upheavals. If many Chinese mathematicians nowadays are making distinguished contributions at the frontiers of science and if mathematics in China enjoys high popularity in public esteem, that is due in large measure to the leadership Hua gave his country, as scholar and teacher, for 50 years.

Hua was born in 1910 in Jintan in the southern Jiangsu Province of China. Jintan is now a flourishing town, with a high school named after Hua and a memorial building celebrating his achievements; but in 1910 it was little more than a village where Hua's father managed a general store with mixed success. The family was poor throughout Hua's formative years; in addition, he was a frail child afflicted by a succession of illnesses, culminating in typhoid fever that caused paralysis of his left leg; this impeded his movement quite severely for the rest of his life. Fortunately Hua was blessed from the start with a cheerful and optimistic disposition, which stood him in good stead then and during the many trials ahead.

Hua's formal education was brief and, on the face of it, hardly a preparation for an academic career - the first degree he would receive was an honorary doctorate from the University of Nancy in France in 1980; nevertheless, it was of a quality that did help his intellectual development. The Jintan Middle School that opened in 1922 just when he had completed elementary school had a well-qualified and demanding mathematics teacher who recognized Hua's talent and nurtured it. In addition, Hua learned early on to make up for the lack of books, and later of scientific literature, by tackling problems directly from first principles, an attitude that he maintained enthusiastically throughout his life and encouraged his students in later years to adopt.

Next, Hua gained admission to the Chinese Vocational College in Shanghai, 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 that same year also, Hua married Xiaoguan Wu; the following year a daughter, Shun, was born and their first son, Jundong, arrived in 1931.

By the time Hua returned to Jintan he was already engaged in mathematics 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 quintic was fundamentally flawed. Hua's lucid analysis caught the eye of a discerning professor at Quing Hua University in Beijing, 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. He 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 came promotion to the rank of lecturer. By that time he had published another dozen papers and in some of these one could begin to find intimations of his future interests; thanks to his natural talent and dedication, Hua was now, at the age of 24, a professional mathematician.

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