Biographical Memoirs Volume 81 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Loo-Keng Hua
Loo-Keng Hua
Pages 136-155
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From page 137... ...
He spent most of his working life in China cluring some of that country's most turbulent political upheavals. If many Chinese mathematicians nowadays are making clistinguishecl contributions at the frontiers of science en cl if mathematics in China enjoys high popularity in public esteem, that is clue in large measure to the leaclership Hua gave his country, as scholar en cl teacher, for 50 years.
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From page 138... ...
Next, Hua gainecl admission to the Chinese Vocational College in Shanghai, en cl there he clistinguishecl himself by winning a national abacus competition, although tuition fees at the college were low, living costs proved too high for his means en cl Hua was forcecl to leave a term before gracluating. After failing to fins!
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From page 139... ...
At this time Quing Hua University was the leacling Chinese institution of higher eclucation, en c! its faculty was in the forefront of the endeavor to bring the country's mathematics en cl science abreast of knowlecige in the West, a formiciable task after several huncirec!
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From page 140... ...
Ramanujan returned to the case k= 2 in order to cletermine the number of representations of an integer as the sum of s squares by means of Fourier analysis, an approach inspired by their famous work on partitions, en cl they succeeclecI. This encouraged Harcly en cl Littlewoocl in 1920 to apply a similar method for general k, and they devised the so-callecl circle method to tackle the general Hilbert-Waring
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From page 141... ...
(N) comes from integration over these intervals while the integral over the complement, usually referred to as the minor arcs, is of a lesser order of magnitucle.
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From page 142... ...
against which Hua set to work as a young man, en cl it is probably fair to say that it is for his contributions in this area that Hua's name will remain best remembered: notably for his seminal work on the estimation of trigonometric sums like T(ocJ, singly or on average. One such average result, now known as Hua's lemma, asserts that for any £ > 0 en c!
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From page 143... ...
him when later he reached a position of authority in the new China. In the years ahead, even though Hua's scientific activities branched out in other directions, Hua was always really to return to Waring's problem, to number theory in general en cl especially to questions involving exponential sums, thus as late as 1959 he publisher!
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From page 144... ...
In September 1946, shortly after returning from Russia, Hua clicl depart for Princeton, bringing with him projects not only in matrix theory but also in functions of several complex variables en cl in group theory. At this time civil war was raging in China en cl it was not easy to travel, therefore, the Chinese authorities assignee!
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From page 145... ...
the basis for the monograph "Classical Groups" by Wan Zhe Xian en cl Hua (publishecl by the Shanghai Scientific Press in Chinese in 1963~. On the personal side, in the spring of 1947 Hua underwent an operation at the Johns Hopkins University on his lame leg that much improver!
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From page 146... ...
The following year he was one of a 26-member clelegation 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 trustee!
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From page 147... ...
Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains came out in 1958 and was translatecl into Russian in the same year, followocl by an English translation by the American Mathematical Society in 1963. Most of the results of this important monograph are clue to Hua, with some overlap with the work of Siegel.
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From page 148... ...
Whether in ad hoc problemsolving 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 unsolicitecl letter of commendation from Mao, this last a valuable protection in uncertain times. Hua hacl a commanding presence, a genial personality, and a wonderful way of putting things simply, en cl the impact of his travels spreacl his fame en cl the popularity of mathematics across the land.3 When much later he traveled abroad, wherever he stayed Chinese communities of all political persuasions flock to meet him en cl clo him honor, in 1984 when he organizer!
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From page 149... ...
en cl are now irretrievably lost, en cl attempts were macle to extract from his associates en cl former students damaging allegations against him. (In 1978 the Chinese ambassador to the Unitecl Kingdom clescribecl one such occasion to me, Chen {ing-run, then probably the best known Chinese mathematician of the next generation, was macle to stanc!
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From page 150... ...
en cl in poor health, but a characteristic zest for life en cl a quenchIess 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.
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From page 151... ...
2. Among his students were Chen Ting-run, Pan Chen-dong, and Wang Yuan in number theory; Wan Zhi Xian in algebra; and Kung Sheng and Lu Hi Keng in analysis.
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From page 152... ...
44:335-46. 1940 On an exponential sum.
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From page 153... ...
1963 Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains (English translation)
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From page 154... ...
. Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society.
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