Chapter 36 35. Hua Luogeng——Father of the People's Mathematical Science Popularization

Hua Luogeng (1910-1985), male, Han nationality, native of Jintan County, Jiangsu Province, member of the Communist Party of China and member of the Democratic League.During his lifetime, he served as the director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.famous mathematician. Hua Luogeng enjoys a high reputation in the international mathematics community and has made great contributions to the development and application of contemporary mathematics in China.He graduated from junior high school, but because of his poor family, he had to work and study by himself. In the spring of 1930, his academic paper "The Reasons Why Su Jiaju's Algebraic Quintic Equation Solution Cannot Be Established" attracted the attention of Professor Xiong Qinglai, then director of the Department of Mathematics of Tsinghua University, and invited him to work in Tsinghua University.Subsequently, Hua Luogeng published a mathematical monograph "Theory of Heaping Prime Numbers" and a series of academic papers, and went to the Soviet Union and the United States for academic exchanges.After the founding of New China, he gave up the generous treatment given to him as a lifelong professor by a university in the United States, overcame many difficulties and returned to the embrace of the motherland, and devoted himself to the research cause of mathematical science in our country.He has made outstanding achievements in the research fields of multivariate complex variable functions, number theory, algebra and applied mathematics, and many theorems, lemmas, inequalities, operators and methods are named after him.He also paid great attention to the cause of socialist construction with great enthusiasm, and devoted himself to serving the national economy with mathematics.In the last 20 years of his life, he devoted almost all his energies to the promotion and application of mathematical methods, especially the promotion and application of the "double method"-optimization method and overall planning method, which achieved significant economic and social benefits.

Hua Luogeng was born in a small merchant family in Jintan County, Jiangsu Province on November 12, 1910. After graduating from Renqu Primary School in the county seat at the age of 12, Hua Luogeng entered Jintan County Junior High School and fell in love with mathematics. After graduating from middle school in 1925, due to his poor family, he was unable to enter high school, so he had to study accounting at the Zhonghua Vocational School founded by Huang Yanpei in Shanghai, in order to find a job in accounting to support his family.In less than a year, due to the high cost of living, he was forced to drop out of school and returned to Jintan to help his father manage the grocery store.In the monotonous life of standing at the counter, he began to teach himself mathematics.While working and keeping accounts, he studied mathematics at the same time.

In the autumn of 1927, Hua Luogeng and Wu Xiaozhi got married. In 1929, Hua Luogeng was employed as a general servant of Jintan Middle School, and began to publish papers in Shanghai "Science" and other magazines. In the winter of 1929, he suffered from severe typhoid fever. After nearly half a year of treatment, he recovered, but the joints of his left leg were seriously damaged, and he was permanently disabled. He had to use a cane to walk. When Hua Luogeng started his career as a mathematician, he had only one copy of "Algebra", "Geometry" and "Calculus" with missing pages. In the spring of 1930, his paper "Reasons for Su Jiaju's Algebraic Five-degree Equation Solution Cannot Be Established" was published in the Shanghai "Science" magazine.Professor Xiong Qinglai, who was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University at the time, attached great importance to this article after reading it. He asked the people around him, "Who is this Hua Luogeng?", but no one had heard of Hua Luogeng.Later, a Tsinghua teacher named Tang Peijing introduced the life experience of his fellow villager Hua Luogeng to Xiong Qinglai. "This young man is really not simple! He should be invited to Tsinghua University." Xiong Qinglai was very appreciative after hearing this.This year, Hua Luogeng was only 19 years old.

Hua Luogeng worked and studied at Tsinghua University. In 1933, he was exceptionally promoted to teaching assistant, and in 1935 he became a lecturer. In 1936, recommended by Tsinghua University, he was sent to study at Cambridge University in England. He returned to China in 1938 and was employed as a professor of Southwest Associated University.From 1939 to 1941, under extremely difficult conditions, he wrote more than 20 papers and completed his first mathematical monograph "Theory of Stacked Prime Numbers". "Theory of Stacked Prime Numbers" later became a classic of mathematics. It was published in Russian in the Soviet Union in 1947, and was translated and published in German, English, Hungarian and Chinese in various countries.

From February to May 1946, he was invited to visit the Soviet Union.Then he was selected by the National Government at that time to go to the United States for inspection. In September, Hua Luogeng, Li Zhengdao, Zhu Guangya and others left Shanghai for the United States. They first served as visiting professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and were later hired as tenured professors by the University of Illinois. When New China was founded in 1949, Hua Luogeng felt extremely excited, overcame various difficulties, and determined to return home with his family.The five of them left the United States by boat and arrived in Hong Kong in February 1950.He published an open letter to students studying in the United States in Hong Kong. The letter was full of patriotic passion and encouraged overseas students to come back and serve the new China. On March 16, 1950, Hua Luogeng, his wife and children arrived in Beijing by train.

Hua Luogeng returned to Tsinghua University and served as the dean of the Department of Mathematics of Tsinghua University.Then, at the invitation of Guo Moruo, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he began to prepare for the establishment of the Institute of Mathematics. In July 1952, the Institute of Mathematics was established, and he served as the director.He devoted himself to cultivating mathematics talents for the new China. Wang Yuan, Lu Qikeng, Gong Sheng, Chen Jingrun, Wan Zhexian, etc. became famous mathematicians under his training. In just a few years after returning to China, his research in the field of mathematics has achieved fruitful results.In January 1957, his paper "Theory of Multivariate Functions of Complex Variables on Typical Fields" won the first prize of the National Invention Award, and he published monographs in Chinese, Russian, and English versions successively; in 1957 he published "Introduction to Number Theory"; in 1959 Leipzig first published "Estimation of Exponential Sums and Its Application in Number Theory" in German, and then successively published Russian and Chinese editions; in 1963, he and his student Wan Zhexian co-wrote "Typical Groups" book published.In order to cultivate young people's enthusiasm for learning mathematics, he initiated and organized a mathematics competition for middle school students in Beijing. He personally participated in setting questions, invigilating examinations, and marking papers, and he went to other places to promote this activity many times.He also wrote a series of popular books on mathematics, which had a great influence on teenagers.He advocated that an academic atmosphere should be cultivated and academic discussions should be carried out in scientific research.He initiated the establishment of the my country Institute of Computer Technology and became one of the earliest scientists in my country who advocated the development of electronic computers.

In 1958, Hua Luogeng was appointed as the vice president and head of the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Science and Technology of China.While continuing to study mathematical theory, he tried hard to find a way to combine mathematics with industrial and agricultural practice.After a period of practice, he found that the overall planning method and optimization method in mathematics are relatively commonly used methods in industrial and agricultural production, which can improve work efficiency and change the appearance of work management.Therefore, while giving lectures at the University of Science and Technology, he led students to promote the optimization method and overall planning method in industrial and agricultural practice. In 1964, he wrote "Planning Method and Supplement of Overall Planning Method" and "Pinghua of Optimal Method and Its Supplement", and personally led teachers and students of University of Science and Technology of China to some enterprise factories to promote and apply "Double Method" to serve industrial and agricultural production.

Hua Luogeng has done a lot of social work.He was a member of the Standing Committee of the 1st to 6th National People's Congress; he joined the Democratic League in September 1952 and was elected as the vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Democratic League in 1979.He put forward his request to join the Communist Party of China in 1958, and was approved to join the Communist Party of China in June 1979. When answering the encouragement of Comrade Deng Yingchao, he said: "Heng Dao doesn't care about the white head, leaps forward and closely follows the young and strong, and lives up to the party members." name."

On June 3, 1985, he visited Japan at the invitation of the Japan Asian Cultural Exchange Association. At 4:00 pm on June 12, he gave a lecture to the Japanese mathematics community in the lecture hall of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Tokyo. The topic of the lecture was "Theoretical Mathematics and Its Applications".The speech ended at 5:15 p.m., and the moment he accepted the flowers, his body suddenly leaned back and fell on the podium. At 10:09 p.m., he announced that he had died of acute myocardial infarction. Hua Luogeng has made great achievements in mathematics throughout his life. He has made outstanding achievements in many fields such as number theory, matrix geometry, typical groups, automorphic function theory, multiple complex variable function theory, partial differential equations, and high-dimensional numerical integration. contribute.The reason why he has such a great achievement is mainly because he has a sincere patriotic heart and a persistent and innovative spirit.