Hua, Loo-Keng

Hua Loo-Keng (1910 1985), a self-taught mathematician, is remembered as one of the leading scholars of his time. Hua spent most of his working life in China and suffered at first hand the turbulence of twentieth-century Chinese politics but he also travelled extensively. This included time spent at Cambridge in the 1930s, when he made notable contributions to number theory, and post-war visits to Russia and America. Hua was appointed a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois in 1949, but he chose instead to return to China to train the next generation of mathematicians and becam...