Hua Luogeng

Hua Luogeng, also written Hua Loo-Keng, was a Chinese mathematician and politician born in Jintan in 1910 and famous for his work in number theory and for leading mathematical research and education in the People's Republic of China. He had no formal university education, only primary school and three years of secondary school, yet his early papers so impressed Xiong Qinglai that he was invited to Tsinghua University in 1931. He identified and nurtured Chen Jingrun, who proved Chen's theorem on the Goldbach conjecture. His later work on optimization and operations research had a large effect on the Chinese economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1982 and held senior political posts before his death in 1985.