Yu Hsiu Ku

Yu Hsiu Ku or Gu Yuxiu (Chinese: 顾毓琇; December 24, 1902 – September 9, 2002) was a Chinese-American electrical engineer, musician, novelist, poet, and politician.

Ku made contributions to Chinese literature, poetry, and music; to electrical engineering and applied mathematics; and to the history of Zen Buddhism.

He also helped found the predecessor institutions of the Chinese Central Conservatory of Music and Shanghai Theatre Academy.

The IEEE/CSEE Yu-Hsiu Ku Electrical Engineering Award is named in his honor, and a museum dedicated to his accomplishments stands at his ancestral home in Wuxi.

[2] In 1920, he helped found a literary society at Tsing Hua with Liang, Wu Wenzao, Qi Xueqi, Wen Yiduo, Yu Shangyuan, and others.

[3] He traveled to the United States on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, from 1923 to 1928, he completed a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctorate in electrical engineering in the record-setting span of three and a half years, with Percy Williams Bridgman and Alfred North Whitehead among his mentors.

[4] His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Vannevar Bush, concerned transients in alternating current devices.

[1][12] Ku became a member of the National Assembly of Taiwan; a trip he took to a scientific conference in Moscow in 1968 became the first visit of a Taiwanese government official to the Soviet Union since 1949.

[15] He has connections as a friend, teacher, or advisor to several leaders of both Taiwan and China, including Jiang Zemin, whom he taught at Shanghai Jiao-Tong University in the 1930s and who visited him in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and Chiang Kai-shek, whom he worked with as deputy education minister, Deng Xiaoping, and Lee Teng-hui, who wrote Ku a poem for his 90th birthday.

[19] A 2001 concert featuring his works was attended by Chinese Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin.