Feng Kang, mathematician, scientist.

He was born in Nanjing, China on Sept 9, 1920. He spent his childhood in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. 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 in two years later he transferred to the Department of Physics where he studied until his graduation in 1944. He got interested in maths and studied it in the university. After graduation he got disease of 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 L.S. Pontrjagin. 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.

Academic life

Feng Kang's scientific contributions range many fields. Before 1957 he mainly worked on pure mathematics, specially on Topological groups, Lie groups and generalized function theory. From 1957 he changed to applied mathematics and computational mathematics. Because of his sound and broad knowledge in mathematics and physics, he did a series of historical and pioneer research on computational mathematics.

In the later 1950s and early 1960s, based on the computations of dam constructions, Professor Feng proposed a systematic numerical method for solving partial differential equations. The method was called Finite difference method based on variation principle. This method was also independently invented in the west, calling finite element method. Now it is regarded that the invention of finite element method is a milestone of computational mathematics. In 70s Professor Feng gave embedding theories in the discontinuous finite element space, and generalized classical theory on elliptic equation to various dimensional combination, which provided a mathematical foundation for elastic composite structures.

Also in the 1970s, he made great efforts and contributions in reducing elliptic equation to boundary integral equation. He gave natural boundary element method, which is now regarded as one of three main boundary element methods. From 1978 he had given lectures and seminars on finite elements and natural boundary elements in more than ten universities and institutes in France, Italy, Japan and USA.

From 1984 Professor Feng changed his research field from elliptic equation to dynamics systems such as Hamiltonian systems and wave equations. He proposed symplectic algorithms for Hamiltonian systems based on symplectic geometry. Such algorithms can preserve symplectic geometric structure of Hamiltonian systems. He then led and supervised a research group on the symplectic algorithms for Hamiltonian systems with finite and infinite dimensions, and on dynamical systems with Lie algebraic structures, such as contact systems, source free systems, etc., from the view point of the corresponding geometry and Lie algebra-Lie group. These algorithms have overwhelmingly superior to conventional algorithms in long term tracking and qualitative simulation in many practice applications, such as celestial mechanics, molecular dynamics, etc.