With only a junior high school education and a physical disability, he became a world-renowned mathematician｜Time Letter

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Original Scientist Letters

He was born in poverty, but he taught himself in hardship; he only had a junior high school diploma, but he was famous and renowned both at home and abroad; he gave up his comfortable life abroad twice just to return to China to serve the country. He is Hua Luogeng, the father of modern mathematics in China, a people's scientist, and one of the "88 great mathematicians in the world today" listed by the University of Chicago.

Hua Luogeng

Source: Tencent News

Hua Luogeng loved to think since he was young. When he was in middle school, his mathematics teacher Wang Weike discovered his mathematical talent. He taught himself a calculus textbook in just 10 days.

When he was young, Hua Luogeng did not have a smooth career because of his intelligence. He dropped out of junior high school after only one year due to poverty. After returning home, he completed high school and university courses on his own. At the age of 19, Hua Luogeng contracted a serious illness. After being bedridden for half a year, his left leg became disabled and he had to use a cane to walk.

But Hua Luogeng did not become depressed because of poverty and illness. He was still obsessed with what he loved and devoted himself to studying mathematics. At the age of 20, Hua Luogeng discovered an error in the paper of mathematician Su Jiaju and published an article entitled "The Reason Why Su Jiaju's Algebraic Quintic Equation Solution Is Invalid". This article was appreciated by Xiong Qinglai, the head of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University, and Hua Luogeng was hired as an assistant.

Source | Communist Youth League Central Committee

In his spare time, Hua Luogeng taught himself English, French and German and published several papers. In 1933, he was promoted to assistant professor again, and in 1934 he was promoted to lecturer.

In 1936, Hua Luogeng went to study at Cambridge University in the UK. In order to learn more courses, he gave up applying for a doctorate. In two years, he wrote 20 papers, proposed the "Hua Theorem" and improved Hardy's conclusion. The young Hua Luogeng became famous in the mathematics community. But when the news of the fall of the country reached Britain, Hua Luogeng immediately decided to return to his motherland to share the suffering with his compatriots.

Hua Luogeng and his family at Southwest Associated University in the 1930s

Source | Communist Youth League Central Committee

In 1943, Yu Dawei, then director of the Ordnance Department, visited Hua Luogeng and invited him to crack the Japanese military code. Hua Luogeng stayed up all night, repeatedly comparing and looking for the pattern of numbers in the code, and finally used the "Mubius function" to decipher the code.

In the autumn of 1946, Hua Luogeng was hired as a tenured professor at the University of Illinois in the United States. However, when the news of the founding of the People's Republic of China came from across the ocean, Hua Luogeng actively responded to the call to return to China to serve, gave up his villa, car and half a year's salary, and returned home with his wife and children.

In 1950, Hua Luogeng returned to China with many of his overseas classmates.

Source | Communist Youth League Central Committee

After returning to China, Hua Luogeng served as the director of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University and the director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and organized the establishment of China's first electronic computer research group.

In the spring of 1956, Hua Luogeng was appointed director of the Preparatory Committee of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, laying the foundation for the development of my country's computer technology.

On January 24, 1957, Hua Luogeng received the first scientific prize awarded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published his acceptance speech in the People's Daily: "After I accepted this noble award, I can only work harder to repay the motherland by doing more and better work, and repay the people by training more and better young people."

People's Daily's report on "my country's first scientific prize"

Source | Communist Youth League Central Committee

While engaging in theoretical research in mathematics, Hua Luogeng was also committed to using mathematics to serve the national economy and tried to find a way to combine mathematics with industrial and agricultural practice.
Since the 1960s, Hua Luogeng began to promote the optimization method across the country. He went deep into factories, mines and rural areas. After more than 20 years of hard work, the optimization method has been applied in many industries and has generated billions of huge economic benefits.
On February 19, 1973, Hua Luogeng wrote a letter to Wang Daheng, in which he put forward some ideas and suggestions on how to apply optimization methods to optical design while he was on his sickbed.

Scientists' manuscripts

Source | Senior Scientists Academic Growth Data Collection Project

The last photo of Hua Luogeng before his death

Source | Communist Youth League Central Committee

Hua Luogeng pioneered the study of Chinese analytic number theory, classical groups, matrix geometry, automorphic function theory and multi-complex function theory, and devoted his life to the mathematics he loved. In his seventies, he once said: "Old trees tend to become empty, and old people tend to become loose. The way of science is to avoid emptiness and looseness. I wish to be practical all my life."

Hua Luogeng

(1910.11—1985.6)

Mathematician

Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

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