Hua Loo Keng: A Brief Outline of his Life and Works

Abstract

Hua Loo Keng was born on 12 November, 1910 in Jintan county in the south of Jiangsu Province of China. His father managed a small family grocery store, and they were too poor to allow him to enrol in senior middle school when he graduated from Jintan junior middle school (the equivalent of the first three years of high school). He then attended the Shanghai Chung-Hua Vocational School where he completed one and a half years of its two-year accounting course. He was forced by the poor circumstances of his family to leave school at the age of fifteen and return home to help his father in the family shop. He could only learn mathematics from books in his spare time. Very soon, he became so interested in his mathematics that he could not pay full attention to the shop. His father was unhappy with him and often threatened to burn his books.