Wang's Life
Wang Yongmin was born in 1943, in Nanyang, Henan province, China. In 1968 he graduated from USTC, but soon after that he was sentenced to farm labour in the programme of "labour re-education" during the Chinese Cultural revolution.
In 1978 he undertook research on a system for decomposing Chinese characters into their constituent parts with minimal ambiguity. This research ultimately resulted in Wubi, an input method patented in China and internationally. Other structural methods, which first appeared around the same time, assumed a one-to-one mapping between components of Chinese characters and Latin keys (for example, Cangjie). Instead, Wang Yongmin assigned several character components to each key relying on the inherent redundancy of Chinese characters. For example, the U key can generate 13 different shapes (such as 立, 六, 辛 or 冫), but a sequence of at most four keys always disambiguates individual shapes, for example, pressing UEMC produces 毅, mapping U to 立 for this character.
The first PC version of Wubi appeared in 1984, and soon became the most popular method of entering Chinese characters in the PRC, becoming known as "China's first software" (中国第一软件).
In 1989 Wang Yongmin established his own company Wangma (lit. Wang Code).
In 1988 he received the title of National Model Worker (全国劳动模范).
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