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Loo-Keng Hua

On the personal side, in the spring of 1947 Hua underwent an operation at the Johns Hopkins University on his lame leg that much improved his gait thereafter, to his and his family's delight. Also in 1947 their daughter Su was born; two more sons had arrived earlier, Ling and Guang, the latter in 1945 and one more daughter, Mi, was born a little later. In the spring of 1948 Hua accepted appointment as a full professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. There he directed the thesis of R Ayoub, later a professor at Pennsylvania State University; continued his work with I Reiner; and influenced the thinking of several young research workers, L Schoenfeld and J Mitchell among them. His stay in Illinois was all too brief, exciting developments were taking place in China, and Hua watched them eagerly, wanting to be part of the new epoch. Although he had brought his wife and three younger children to Urbana and they had settled in quite well, the urge to return was too great; on March 16, 1950, he was back in Beijing at his alma mater, Quing Hua University, ready to add his contribution to the brave new world. He was then at the peak of his mathematical powers and, as he wrote to me many years later, the 1940s had been to him in retrospect the golden years of his life. Despite the trials that he would face, he did not at any subsequent time regret his decision to return.

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 Academia Sinica came into being, with Hua as its first director. The following year he was one of a 26-member delegation from the Academia Sinica to visit the Soviet Union in order to establish links with Russian science. At this time Hua entertained doubts whether the Communist Party at home trusted him, and it came as an agreeable surprise to him to learn in Moscow that the Chinese government had agreed to a proposal by the Soviet government to award Hua a Stalin Prize. Following Stalin's death the prize was discontinued, and Hua missed out; in view of later developments, he told me, he had a double reason to be satisfied!

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. (The preface to the 1975 Chinese edition was excised by government order because Hua was out of favour during much of the Cultural Revolution); later this was published by Springer in English translation and is still in print. 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.

In 1958 he suffered a rude awakening from utopian dreams with the so-called Great Leap Forward, when a Mao-inspired, savage assault on intellectuals swept the country, implemented with enthusiasm by a compliant bureaucracy inspired by Orwellian slogans like:- ... the lowliest are the smartest, the highest the most stupid.

Despite his eminence and some protection in high places, Hua had to suffer harassment, public abuse, and constant surveillance. Nevertheless, during this troubled period Hua developed, with Wang Yuan, a broad interest in linear programming, operations research, and multidimensional numerical integration. In connection with the last of these, the study of the Monte Carlo method and the role of uniform distribution led them to invent an alternative deterministic method based on ideas from algebraic number theory. Their theory was set out in Applications of Number Theory to Numerical Analysis, which was published much later, in 1978, and by Springer in English translation in 1981. The newfound interest in applicable 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 faculty to the solution of 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 from Mao, this last a valuable protection in uncertain times. Hua had a commanding presence, a genial personality, and a wonderful way of putting things simply, and the impact of his travels spread his fame and the popularity of mathematics across the land. When much later he travelled abroad, wherever he stayed Chinese communities of all political persuasions flocked to meet him and do him honour; in 1984 when he organized a conference on functions of several complex variables in Hangzhou, colleagues from the West were astonished by the scale of the publicity accorded it by the Chinese media.

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