Hiong King-lai

Hiong King-lai ( Chinese  熊 慶 來  /  熊 庆 来 , Pinyin Xióng Qìnglái , W.-G. Hsiung Ch'ing-lai ; born October 20, 1893 in Mile (Honghe) , Yunnan Province ; † February 3, 1969 in Beijing ) was a Chinese mathematician .

Hiong King-lai attended a secondary school in Kunming from 1907 . He learned French from 1911 and then studied in Belgium from 1913 . After the outbreak of World War I, he went to France and studied at the universities of Grenoble , Paris , Montpellier and Marseille . After returning to China, he was a professor at the University of Southeast China in Nanjing from 1921 , before becoming professor and head of the Mathematical Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1926 . In 1932 he attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich and then went back to Paris, where he received his doctorate in 1934 under Valiron . He then returned to his previous position at Tsinghua University in China. From 1937 to 1949 he was President of Yunnan University . In 1949 he went to France for the third time. There he took part in a conference of UNESCO . He then continued his scientific work in Paris. Although he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1951 that left his right hand paralyzed, he was still active in research. In 1957 he returned to Beijing and became a professor and director of the functional theory department of the Mathematical Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . He was a member of the Third and Fourth Political Consultative Conferences of the Chinese People in 1959 and 1964 . Hiong was a victim of persecution during the Cultural Revolution in 1969 .

Hiong worked in the field of function theory , especially the Nevanlinnaschen value distribution theory . Here he generalized Milloux's results on the value distribution of meromorphic functions and their derivatives. He also transferred the concept of refined order (English: proximate order) introduced by Valiron to functions of infinite order. Other topics that he dealt with are normal families , algebroid functions, and holomorphic and meromorphic functions in the unit disk.

Hiong played a leading role in building modern mathematics in China and had a great influence on its development there. The students he taught include mathematicians Shiing-Shen Chern , Hua Luogeng, and Pao-Lu Hsu, and physicists Chao Chung-yao , Qian Sanqiang, and Yan Jici . In 1935 he was a co-founder of the Chinese Mathematical Society. From 1944 to 1948 he was its president. In 1936, he and other mathematicians founded the Chinese Journal of Mathematics, renamed Acta Mathematica Sinica in 1952.

China issued a stamp in his honor in 1994.

literature

• Yang Lo : Kinglai Hiong: a brief outline of his life and works . In Proceedings of the Conference on Complex Analysis (Tianjin, 1992) . Conference Proceedings and Lecture Notes in Analysis, I, International Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994; Pp. 3-7.
• Yang Lo: A Biography of the Late Professor King-Lai Hiong, 1893-1969 . In Frontiers of mathematical sciences. The inauguration of the Mathematical Sciences Center of Tsinghua University and the Tsinghua-Sanya International Mathematics Forum , edited by Binglin Gu and Shing-Tung Yau , International Press, Somerville, MA, 2011; Pp. 123-130.
• Wenlin Li, Jean-Claude Martzloff : Aperçu sur les échanges mathématiques entre la Chine et la France (1880-1949) . Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Volume 53 (1998), Issue No. 3-4, pp. 181-200; Biographical information in particular on p. 185.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dissertation Sur les fonctions entières et les fonctions méromorphes d'ordre infini , digitized on Numdam ; published in Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, Neuvième Série , Volume 14, pp. 233-308, digitized on Gallica .
2. ^ Image of the brand on the page Images of Mathematicians on Postage Stamps by Jeff Miller.