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Loo-Keng Hua

But all that was in the future. In 1966 Mao set in motion the next national calamity, which came to be known as the Cultural Revolution and would last 10 years. A pronouncement of Mao dated as early as June 26, 1965, sent a dire signal of things to come to the intellectuals:-

The more you read, the more stupid you become.

Hua spent many of these years under virtual house arrest. He attributed his survival to the personal protection of Chou En-lai. Even so, he was exposed to harassing interrogations, some of his manuscripts (on mathematical economics) were confiscated and are now irretrievably lost, and attempts were made to extract from his associates and former students damaging allegations against him. (In 1978 the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom described one such occasion to me; Chen Jing-run, then probably the best known Chinese mathematician of the next generation, was made to stand in a public place for several hours, surrounded by a mob, and exhorted to bear witness against Hua. Chen, present at this conversation, chimed in to say that, actually, he had quite enjoyed the occasion, since no student could trouble him with silly questions and he had had time, uninterrupted, to think about mathematics!) It is surely no accident that the flow of Hua's publications came to an untimely end in 1965. He continued to work, of course. There are several joint papers on numerical analysis (with Wang Yuan) and on optimisation (with Ke Xue Tong Bao) in the 1970s, but these are probably based on work done earlier; there are also expository articles and texts derived from the vast teaching and consulting experience he accumulated over the years. As he would reminisce sadly in a 1991 article:-

Upon entering [my] sixtieth year ... almost all energy and spirit were taken from me.

With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 Hua entered upon the last period of his life. Honour was restored to him at home, and he became a vice-president of Academia Sinica, a member of the People's Congress and science advisor to his government. In addition, Chinese Television (CCTV) produced a mini-series telling the story of Hua's life, which has been shown at least twice since then. In 1980 he became a cultural ambassador of his country 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. For much of this time he was tired and in poor health, but a characteristic zest for life and a quenchless curiosity never deserted him; to a packed audience in a seminar in Urbana in the spring of 1984 he spoke about mathematical economics. One felt that he was driven to make up for all those lost years. In his last letter to me, dated 21 May 1985, he reported that unfortunately most of his time now was devoted to:-

... non-mathematical activities, which are necessary for my country and my people.

He died of a heart attack at the end of a lecture he gave in Tokyo on 12 June 1985.

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