Feng Kang

Feng Kang (simplified Chinese: 冯康; traditional Chinese: 馮康; pinyin: Féng Kāng) (September 9, 1920 - August 17, 1993) was a Chinese mathematician and scientist.

He was born in Nanjing, China and spent his childhood in Suzhou, Jiangsu. He studied at Suzhou Middle School. In 1939 he was admitted to Department of Electrical Engineering of the National Central University (which moved to Chongqing during 1937~1945 and changed the name to Nanjing University in 1949 and reinstated in Taiwan in 1962) and two years later he transferred to the Department of Physics where he studied until his graduation in 1944. He got interested in mathematics and studied it at the university.

After graduation he contracted vertebral tuberculosis and continued to learn mathematics by himself at home. Later in 1946 he went to teach mathematics at Tsinghua University. In 1951 he was appointed as assistant professor at Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. From 1951 to 1953 he worked at Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, under the supervision of Professor Lev Pontryagin. In 1957 he was elected as an associate professor at Institute of Computer Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he began his work on computational mathematics and became the founder and leader of computational mathematics and scientific computing in China. In 1978 he was appointed as the first Director of the newly founded Computing Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences until 1987 when he became the Honorary Director.