Su Buqing

Su Buqing, also spelled Su Buchin, was a Chinese mathematician, educator and poet who is regarded as the founder of differential geometry in China. Born in 1902 in Pingyang County, Zhejiang Province, he went to Japan on a scholarship, studied electrical engineering at the Tokyo Higher Technical College and then mathematics at Tohoku Imperial University, where he took his doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on the relation between affine and projective differential geometry. Returning to China he became a professor and dean at Zhejiang University, moved with his students to Fudan University in 1952 and later served as its honorary president, and he was honorary chairman of the Chinese Mathematical Society. His research covered affine and projective differential geometry, conjugate nets in higher dimensional space, the theory of K-spreads and, later, computer aided geometric design; a geometric shape called the Su-cone is named for him. He wrote more than 160 papers and over 20 monographs and textbooks, among them Computational Geometry, Curve and Surface Modeling, written with Liu Dingyuan, and a prize of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics carries his name. He died in 2003.