Hua Luogeng

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Hua.

Hua Luogeng (traditional Chinese: 華羅庚; simplified Chinese: 华罗庚; pinyin: Huà Luógēng; Wade-Giles: Hua Lo-keng; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician born in Jintan, Jiangsu. He was the founder and pioneer of many fields in mathematical research. He wrote more than 200 papers and monographs, many of which became classic documents. Since his sudden death while delivering a lecture in the University of Tokyo, Japan, many mathematics secondary education programs have been named after him. In the early 1930's, his book on cumulative prime number theory has been influential to many subsequent number theorists in China, including renowned Chen Jingrun who obtained the best result so far in the binary Goldbach conjecture. Hua also made contributions to the development of college education in China. He was the first Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Vice President of University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of Chinese university established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1958, which was aimed to foster skilled researchers necessary for the economic development, defense and education in science and technology.

Hua's father was a small businessman. Hua met a capable math teacher in middle school who recognized his talent early and encouraged him to read advanced texts. Hua was partially paralyzed in his late teenage, due to mistreatment in a prolonged illness during which he stayed in bed for half a year. His first significant result was concerned with a paper written by Dr. Su Jiaju who claimed to have a closed form radical solution of the quintics. Hua studied Abel's original paper on the unsolvability of quintics and found a miscalculation in a 13x13 matrix in Su's paper. Henceforth Hua published his rebuttal in an influential mathematics journal in China, which was noticed by some professors in Tsinghua University, especially Dr. Xiong Qinglai.