page_title: Hua Luogeng
section_title: Early middle years (1936–1950)
hierarchical_section_title: Hua Luogeng / Biography / Early middle years (1936–1950)
caption_attribution_description: 中文（简体）‎: custom-made shoes Hua Luogeng bought in West Germany in 1946. Hua Luogeng Memorial Museum.
context_page_description: Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his important contributions to number theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in the People's Republic of China. He was largely responsible for identifying and nurturing the renowned mathematician Chen Jingrun who proved Chen's theorem, the best known result on the Goldbach conjecture. In addition, Hua's later work on mathematical optimization and operations research made an enormous impact on China's economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1982. He was elected a member of the standing Committee of the first to sixth National people's Congress, Vice-Chairman of the sixth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and Vice-Chairman of the China Democratic League. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1979.
  Hua did not receive a formal university education. Although awarded several honorary PhDs, he never got a formal degree from any university. In fact, his formal education only consisted of six years of primary school and three years of middle school.
context_section_description: While at Cambridge University, Hua worked on applying the Hardy–Littlewood circle method towards problems in number theory. He produced seminal work on Waring's problem, which would establish his fame within the international math community. In 1938, after the full outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Hua chose to return to China to Tsinghua, where he was appointed full professor despite not having any degree. At the time, with vast areas of China under Japanese occupation, Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Nankai University had merged into the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, capital of the southern province Yunnan. In spite of the hardships of poverty, enemy bombings, and relative academic isolation from the rest of the world, Hua continued to produce first-rate mathematics. During his eight years there, Hua studied Vinogradov's seminal method of estimating trigonometric sums and reformulated it in sharper form, in what is now known universally as Vinogradov's mean value theorem. This famous result is central to improved versions of the Hilbert–Waring theorem, and has important applications to the study of the Riemann zeta function. Hua wrote up this work in a booklet titled Additive Theory of Prime Numbers that was accepted for publication in Russia as early as 1940, but owing to the war, did not appear in expanded form until 1947 as a monograph of the Steklov Institute. In the closing years of the Kunming period, Hua turned his interests to algebra and analysis towards which he soon began to make original contributions.
  After the war, Hua spent three months in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1946, at Ivan Vinogradov's invitation, following which Hua departed for Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University. At Princeton, Hua worked on matrix theory, functions of several complex variables, and group theory. At this time civil war was raging in China and it was not easy to travel, and for "convenience of travel," the Chinese authorities had assigned Hua the rank of general in his passport.
  In the spring of 1948, Hua accepted appointment as full professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. However, his stay in Illinois was far too brief. In October 1949, the People's Republic of China was established, and Hua, wanting to be part of a new epoch, decided to return to China with his wife and kids, despite having settled comfortably in the United States.
caption: custom-made shoes Hua Luogeng bought in West Germany in 1946 after his leg problems were cured.
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