Hua met a capable math teacher in middle school who recognized his talent early and encouraged him to read advanced texts.

After middle school, Hua enrolled in Chinese Vocational College in Shanghai, and there he distinguished himself by winning a national abacus competition.

Although tuition fees at the college were low, living costs proved too high for his means, and Hua was forced to leave a term before graduating.

In spite of the hardships of poverty, enemy bombings, and relative academic isolation from the rest of the world, Hua continued to produce first-rate mathematics.

Hua wrote up this work in a booklet titled Additive Theory of Prime Numbers that was accepted for publication in Russia as early as 1940, but owing to the war, did not appear in expanded form until 1947 as a monograph of the Steklov Institute.

Back in China, Hua threw himself into educational reform and the organization of mathematical activity at the graduate level, in the schools, and among workers in the burgeoning industry.

Despite his many teaching and administrative duties, Hua remained active in research and continued to write, not only on topics that had engaged him before but also in areas that were new to him or had been only lightly touched on before.

Hua developed, with Wang Yuan, a broad interest in linear programming, operations research, and multidimensional numerical integration.

The newfound interest in applicable mathematics took him in the 1960s, accompanied by a team of assistants, all over China to show workers of all kinds how to apply their reasoning faculty to the solution of shop-floor and everyday problems.

Whether in ad hoc problem-solving sessions in factories or open-air teachings, he touched his audiences with the spirit of mathematics to such an extent that he became a national hero and even earned an unsolicited letter of commendation from Mao Zedong, this last a valuable protection in uncertain times.

Hua had a commanding presence, a genial personality, and a wonderful way of putting things simply, and the impact of his travels spread his fame and the popularity of mathematics across the land.

In 1980 Hua became a cultural ambassador of China charged with re-establishing links with Western academics, and during the next five years he travelled extensively in Europe, the United States, and Japan.