Influencing MIT of China

Mathematician, control theorist, and retired Harvard professor, Dr. Larry Yu-Chi Ho moved around a lot as a child, following his Nationalist Army (Guomindang) father to various places in the interior of China during WWII. (See post one.) At the end of the war, Larry and his families escaped to Taiwan. When he graduated high school at age 15, he came across the Pacific to attend MIT.  He met many helping hands along the way. (See post two and three.) He graduated, found a research position in one of the first-ever washing machine companies, and won the immigration lottery. (See post four.) He returned to school, this time to Harvard where he was one of a handful of students.( See post five.)

Larry tried to retire in 2001, but Harvard asked him to stay on as a research professor, and Qinhua University in Beijing --the MIT of China--asked for his guidance. He said that hardware at Qinhua was not an issue, and his office in Beijing was better equipped than the one at Harvard. “I was helping them to upgrade their software, so to speak, how to behave in international science dealings. They have come along quite well. (Today) they are quite well known.”

For the past 17 years, Larry has been going to China once a year, and staying for about a month each time, teaching  Systems’ Engineering/ Automatic Control. “How did we go and land on the moon accurately? That’s all under control, guidance and control. System Control is the major thing—but that’s applied not just to landing on the moon, but military, commercial, guiding the national economy, everything.  Everything is control. That’s my field basically—the methodology of control. It’s a subject matter that permeates all kinds of disciplines.”

Larry established and obtained funding for a  center called CFINS—Center for Intelligent Network Systems. "It was a tremendous deal for China. (Now), they are on the map in the scientific world.”

(To Be Continued. Next:  The Taste of Freedom.)