Hua Lo-keng (11 October 1909-), mathematician. His papers dealing with number theory and with the geometry of matrices won him international recognition. After serving as professor of mathematics at Southwest Associated University, he went to the United States and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the University of Illinois. In 1950 he resumed teaching and became head of the institute of mathematics of the Academy of Sciences at Peking.

Chint'an, Kiangsu, was the birthplace of Hua Lo-keng. During his school years he spent his spare time working in his father's small shop. In 1923 he was graduated from the junior division of the Chint'an district middle school. He then went to Shanghai and enrolled at the Chung-hua Vocational School to prepare for a business career. Financial difficulties forced him to leave that institution in 1924, only a few months before graduation. He returned home, worked in his father's shop, and studied mathematics. When he was 20, he contracted rheumatic fever, which left him lame. His physical disability barred him from many activities, and mathematics became his consuming interest. About 1929 Hua Lo-keng began to contribute independent papers to mathematical journals at Shanghai. His work attracted the attention of Hsiung Ch'ing-lai (Hiong King-lai), then professor and chairman of the department of mathematics at Tsinghua University in Peking. Hsiung paid him a visit and in 1931 persuaded him to come to Tsinghua to work as an assistant in the mathematics department. Hua served as departmental librarian and acted as research assistant to Hsiung. He used the opportunity to audit courses at Tsinghua and began to study foreign languages. As a protege of Hsiung Ch'ing-lai, he participated in all the activities of the mathematics department. Within five years he had become a lecturer at Tsinghua. After 1934 he began to publish papers on algebra, number theory, and functions of several complex variables in such mathematical journals as the Transactions of the Science Society of China, the Tdhoku Mathematical Journal, the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Mathematische Zeitschrift, the Journal of the London Alathematical Society, and the Doklady Akademü Nauk SSSR. In 1936 Hua Lo-keng received a research fellowship from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture and went to England to study under G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. He returned to China in 1938 to become professor of mathematics at Southwest Associated University in Kunming. During the war years, Hua devoted much attention to problems of number theory, and in 1941 he completed an important manuscript on the additive theory of prime numbers. Because of the war, however, the study could not be published at that time.

In 1945 Hua Lo-keng, by invitation, went to the Soviet Union for a two-month visit, during which he gave lectures and held discussions with prominent Russian mathematicians and scientists. In the spring of 1946 he was invited to visit the United States by the Department of State. He accepted the invitation and became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. He moved to Urbana, Illinois, in 1948 to serve as a visiting research professor in mathematics at the University of Illinois.

Shortly after the Communist military victory on the mainland of China, Hua returned to Peking, where he was appointed professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University. In 1950 he became director of the institute of mathematics of the Academy of Sciences and president of the China Mathematics Society at Peking. A year later he became professor of mathematics at Peking University. Hua visited the Soviet Union as a member of the delegation sent by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1953. During the 1950's he also visited Stockholm, East Berlin, New Delhi, and other cities. In 1956 he wrote a monograph entitled Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains which won a prize from the Academy of Sciences. This important work was translated into Russian in 1959 and into English in 1963. Hua was criticized in 1957 for contributing to an article published in the Kuangming jih-pao which dealt with "Problems of Scientific Systems for China" and which allegedly expressed anti-socialist views. He was "rehabilitated" soon thereafter, and he served as a delegate to "the First and Second National People's congresses.

In 1960 Hua was n^med chairman of the department of applied mathematics at the Scientific and Technical University in Peking. A year later, he became vice president of the institution. In 1964 he was elected a delegate to the Third National People's Congress. Throughout his career Hua Lo-keng published papers which won international recognition. From 1934 to 1944 he dealt almost exclusively with number theory. His important treatise in this field, completed in 1941, did not appear until 1947, when it was published in Leningrad after being translated into Russian. This work was translated from Russian into English and published in 1965 by the American Mathematical Society as Additive Theory of Prime Xumbers. The work is a detailed exposition of the VVaring-Goldbach problem of representing positive integers as sums of a given number of ^,tü powers of primes. He improved the Vinogradov mean-value theorem and extended the Waring problem to the representation of integers as sums of polynomials with integral coefficients. After 1944, Hua concentrated on the geometry of matrices. He also contributed a supplement to Jean Dieudonne's On the Automorphisms of the Classical Groups, which was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1951.

After 1960 many of Hua's writings linked theoretical mathematics with practical production problems in China. An example was his "Notes on Experimental Work in Methods of Over-all Planning," an analytical exposition of the application of abstract concepts to industrial planning and engineering. Another interesting example of Hua's later work was the booklet Ts'ung Sun-tzu te shen-ch'i miao-suan t'an-ch'i [talks on the ingenious mathematical calculations of Sun-tzu], which embodies Hua's successful attempt to solve a problem in number theory posed in the Sun-tzu suan-ching, one of the earliest extant Chinese mathematical texts. The appearance of Hua's booklet in 1964 reflected the emphasis placed by the Communist authorities at Peking on the importance of popularizing mathematical modes of reasoning among young Chinese and on the specific importance of the text as one of the earliest Chinese contributions to the history of mathematics. The Sun-tzu theorem, also known as the Chinese remainder theorem, has long held an important place in the history of mathematics. It has also had an influence on the development of electronic computers.