Hua Luogeng
Native spelling: 华罗庚
1910–1985, Jintan, Jiangsu, China, Tokyo, Japan
Self-taught Chinese mathematician who made lasting contributions to analytic number theory (trigonometric sums and Waring's problem), classical groups, and several complex variables, and built modern mathematical research in China.
Hua Luogeng grew up in poverty in Jintan, Jiangsu; an attack of typhoid fever left his left leg paralysed, and he had to leave vocational school in Shanghai without a degree. Working in his father's small shop by day and studying mathematics by oil lamp at night, he published a 1930 note exposing a flaw in a purported solution of the quintic. Xiong Qinglai invited him to Tsinghua University in 1931, where he rose from library clerk to lecturer in three years without holding a formal degree.
From 1936 to 1938 Hua worked at Cambridge with G. H. Hardy, Harold Davenport, and Hans Heilbronn on the Hardy–Littlewood circle method, Waring's problem, and exponential sums. Returning to wartime China at the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, he sharpened Vinogradov's method for trigonometric sums into what became his monograph 'Additive Prime Number Theory'. In the late 1940s he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study and as a professor at the University of Illinois, opening new lines of research on the geometry of matrices, classical groups, and harmonic analysis of functions of several complex variables on classical domains.
Hua returned to Beijing in 1950 and in 1952 became the founding director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he trained a generation of Chinese mathematicians — including Chen Jingrun on Goldbach's conjecture — and later popularized optimization methods across industry.
Workplaces: Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chinese Academy of Sciences
China