Feng Kang, a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province on September 9, 1920, and lived in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province as a teenager. My father is an intellectual with a high literary accomplishment and has been a civil servant for many years. Mom does housework. The whole family depends on their father's salary, and their living standard is moderate. The father's determination to let his children receive modern education has influenced several brothers and sisters in Feng Kang, who have studied hard since childhood. From 1926 to 1937, Feng Kang studied in the experimental primary school, junior high school and senior high school affiliated to Suzhou Middle School in Jiangsu Province, and his studies have been excellent. After middle school, he became interested in physics and mathematics, which set the tone for his future scientific career.

1937 Shortly after the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War, my hometown was bombed by enemy planes, the school was dissolved, and then the Jiangnan area fell. Feng Kang, like most patriotic youths at that time, hated the Japanese invaders and left the occupied areas for the rear with the hope of victory in the Anti-Japanese War. /kloc-in the spring of 0/939, he was admitted to the Department of Mathematics and Physics in concord college, Fujian with the same academic qualifications. /kloc-in the autumn of 0/939, it was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering of Chongqing Central University again. Two years later, he transferred to the Department of Physics and graduated from 1944. After graduation, his scientific direction changed to mathematics. In fact, he took major courses such as electrical engineering, physics and mathematics in college, and this basic background also played a unique role in his later development.

1945 worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Mathematical Physics in Chongqing and Fudan University, 1946 worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Physics in Tsinghua University, 195 1 transferred to the Department of Mathematics as a teaching assistant. 195 1 year transferred to the Institute of Mathematics of China Academy of Sciences as an assistant researcher. 195 1 to 1953 studied at Czechoslovakia Institute of Mathematics in the Soviet Union. During this period, he has been guided by famous contemporary mathematicians of different styles, such as China, China and the Soviet Union.

1957- 1978, Feng Kang is an associate researcher and researcher in the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, responsible for the academic guidance of scientific and engineering computing and computational mathematics. His research direction turned to applied mathematics and computational mathematics. Feng Kang was elected as an academician of China Academy of Sciences from 65438 to 0980, and served as a member of the State Council Academic Degrees Committee from 65438 to 0980. 1959 was selected as a national advanced worker, 1965 as a deputy to the third national people's congress, and 1979 as a national model worker. 1978 to 1987 served as director of the computing center of China academy of sciences, and 1987 later served as honorary director of the center. 1978 to 1986 served as vice chairman of the national computer society, 1985 to 1990 served as chairman of the national computational mathematics society, and 1990 served as honorary chairman of Ren Xuehui. He is also an honorary professor in the Department of Mathematics of Xi Jiaotong University, the founding director of the International Association of Computational Mechanics, an honorary member of the International Association of Mechanics and Mathematical Interaction, a scientific consultant at the Gloria Institute of Computational and Information Mechanics in London, a scientific consultant at the International Mathematical Research Center in Edinburgh, England, and the editor-in-chief of four first-class computational mathematics magazines: China (2 Chinese and 2 English), China Science, American Computational Physics, Japanese Applied Mathematics and Dutch Applied Mechanics and Engineering.

Before 1957, Feng Kang mainly engaged in basic mathematics research, and made outstanding achievements in topological groups and generalized function theory.

1957 according to the national scientific development plan of 12, China should fill the gap in the field of computer research and application. Feng Kang was transferred from the Institute of Mathematics of Chinese Academy of Sciences to the newly established Institute of Computing Technology, and participated in the pioneering work of computing technology and computational mathematics in China. Later, he made great contributions to the establishment, cultivation and development of the computational mathematics team of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the whole country.

As a pioneer and leader of computational mathematics, Feng Kang paid special attention to the combination of theory and practice. Computational mathematics is a highly applied subject with the emergence of electronic computers, and it is necessary to understand the practical application background and the knowledge of marginal subjects. Feng Kang's solid foundation and profound knowledge of physics and mathematics played an important role in his professional guidance in the field of computational mathematics and his personal research work that he had to learn from scratch. At that time, there were more than 200 people in the third research room of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including dozens of people from all over the country who came to study. Under the guidance of Feng Kang, the laboratory undertook a large number of practical calculation tasks in various departments of national defense and national economy. Feng Kang personally taught relevant physics, mechanics knowledge and computational mathematics theory, and personally asked all topics and gave specific guidance; A series of academic and creative theoretical results and practical effects have been achieved in weather numerical prediction, dam stress calculation, nuclear weapon implosion analysis and calculation, nuclear weapon neutron migration equation calculation, space vehicle high-speed aerodynamic calculation, Daqing Oilfield underground oil-water flooding, aircraft wing aerodynamic flutter calculation, steam turbine blade flow field calculation, hydrodynamic stability calculation and so on. , has made pioneering achievements in popularizing electronic computers and their applications.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Feng Kang created a set of systematic and modern calculation methods for solving differential equations, which were independent of the West, on the basis of solving dam collective research practice. At that time, it was named the difference method based on variational principle, and now it is called the finite element method internationally. The summary paper was published in Applied Mathematics and Computational Mathematics (1965).

In 1970s, Feng Kang established the Poincare inequality of discontinuous function, and based on this, established the internationally advanced embedding theory of discontinuous finite element function space.

Feng Kang also extended the classical theory of elliptic equation to the combined manifold with different dimensions, that is, the geometric structure composed of submanifolds with different dimensions, which is the first in the world, providing a strict mathematical basis for the theory of composite elastic structures and solving the convergence problem of the finite element method of composite structures. The achievement of this work was written into the monograph "Mathematical Theory of Elastic Structures", which was welcomed by the engineering community. In view of the appearance of highly complex structures such as robots and space stations, this direction will have great development prospects, and his students and some foreign scholars are continuing to work.

At the same time, Feng Kang made an important development on the traditional Fredholm theory, which simplified the elliptic equation into a boundary integral equation, and put forward the concept of natural domestication. As a standard method of boundary domestication, the natural boundary element method was formed, which can be naturally coupled with the finite element method and integrated into one. In essence, it became a pioneer of the domain decomposition method suitable for parallel computing.

Starting from 1984, Feng Kang shifted the research focus from the steady-state problem of elliptic equation to the dynamics problem of Hamiltonian equation and wave equation. At the Beijing Symposium on Differential Geometry and Differential Equations (1984), he first proposed a method for calculating Hamiltonian system based on symplectic geometry principle, that is, Hamiltonian algorithm of Hamiltonian system, thus creating a new direction for calculating Hamiltonian system. Because all conserved physical processes can be expressed in Hartmann form and its mathematical basis is symplectic geometry, this new field will have rich scientific connotation and broad application prospects. Since then, Feng Kang has led the research group of Computing Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences, organically combined pure symplectic geometry with modern scientific engineering computing, systematically carried out research in this field, and achieved very important international leading results.

Feng Kang's contribution to science has won the 1978 National Science Conference Major Achievement Award, the second prize of the National Natural Science Award, the first prize of the Natural Science Award of the Academy of Sciences and the second prize of the National Scientific and Technological Progress Award.

In addition to my research work, Feng Kang has also undertaken a lot of administrative work, various business guidance work, and training young talents. Under his guidance and care, the computational mathematics major of the Computing Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has gradually formed an echelon of young outstanding talents, among which 1980 and 1988' s youngest researchers all grew up in the Computing Center under his personal care. At the same time, Feng Kang also put forward many important guiding opinions on the development of computational mathematics in China, such as establishing a national academic journal of computational mathematics and establishing a national computational mathematics society; Put forward urgent suggestions to the central leading comrades, call on all sectors of society to attach importance to scientific and engineering computing, open the scientific and engineering computing laboratory during the establishment of the proposal, and suggest that scientific and engineering computing be included in the national key basic research projects. In particular, he demonstrated that "experiment, theory and calculation have become three important links that complement each other and are relatively independent in scientific methods, and that" science and engineering computing, as a new science with tools, methodology and interdisciplinary, has started its own new development, including computational mathematics, computational physics, computational mechanics, computational chemistry and other computational disciplines formed in recent years. Computational mathematics is their link and * * * sex foundation ". This paper expounds the importance and urgency of computing means to the progress of science and technology, and thus expounds the position and function of scientific and engineering computing from the strategic height of scientific and technological development, which will effectively promote computational mathematics to play its due role in China's four modernizations. Later, an open laboratory of scientific and engineering computing was built, and "Methods and Theories of Scientific and Engineering Computing" was listed as a national key basic research project during the Eighth Five-Year Plan period, with Feng Kang as the chief expert of the project.