He served as president of Peking University, and was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

[1] Born in Yixing, Jiangsu, China, Zhou graduated from Tsinghua University in 1924.

In 1928, he obtained his doctorate degree from California Institute of Technology under Eric Temple Bell with thesis The Gravitational Field of a Body with Rotational Symmetry in Einstein's Theory of Gravitation.

[1] He did his post-doc researches in quantum mechanics at University of Leipzig in Germany and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Tsinghua University's Zhou Pei-Yuan Center for Applied Mathematics is named in his honor.