He was raised by his uncle, "abandoned literature and followed things", and eventually became the "father of mechanics" in modern China.
Mention the "father of mechanics", there will certainly be people who think of Archimedes, in fact, in China, there is also a "father of mechanics", he is with Qian Xuesen, Qian Sanqiang and called "three money", China's famous scientist Qian Weichang.
Qian Weichang's father, Qian Zhi, died at an early age, so the task of educating Qian Weichang fell to his uncle Qian Mu.
In 1930, he graduated from Wuxi No. 1 Middle School, and what he gave back to his uncle was the good results of being admitted to five famous universities at the same time: Tsinghua University, Jiaotong University, Central University, Wuhan University, and Zhejiang University.
Qian Weichang was a serious student in high school, and when he took the college entrance examination, he only scored 5 points in physics, but he was admitted to Tsinghua University, the reason is that his Chinese and history are 100 points, which allows him to be directly admitted to the history department of Tsinghua University.
However, because of the national conditions at that time, Qian Weichang, who originally had a double hundred in liberal arts and 5 points in physics, resolutely decided to abandon literature and materials, and he transferred to the department of physics.
In 1935, he successfully entered the Research Institute of Tsinghua University and won the first award after changing majors, the "Gao Mengdan Scholarship". After that, Qian Weichang did spectral analysis with the help of his mentor Wu Youxun, and successfully went to the University of Toronto in Canada to study at public expense.
During this period, he completed the paper "TheOry of The Inner Nature of Elastic Plate Shell" in only 50 days, proposed the "Plate Shell Inner Theory", and published the world's first theory on singular perturbation, since then, he has emerged in this field and is internationally recognized as the founder of this field.
After completing his studies, he returned to his motherland with his original intention and was recruited as a professor in the Mechanical Department of Tsinghua University, and a professor at Peking University and Yenching University.
In 1956, it was he who formulated and planned China's first "12-year scientific plan", and in the same year he was appointed vice president of Tsinghua University.
Since then, he has been engaged in the study of mechanics on the land for a long time. Whether it is the obscure plate and shell problem, the generalized variational principle, or the ring shell analysis solution and the Chinese character macroscopic glyph encoding that ordinary people avoid, he has made outstanding contributions. He not only proposed the "plate shell inner endowment theory" and "round thin plate large deflection theory", but also published nearly 100 papers, including "Applied Mathematics and Mechanics Papers", about 3 million words.
Qian Weichang has made countless contributions to the field of mechanics in China, including the mechanical industry, civil engineering and construction, as well as aerospace and military industries, so he has been called the "father of mechanics" and the "father of applied mathematics" in modern China.
In 1956, he won the second prize of the National Science Prize; in 1982, he won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award for "Research on the Generalized Variational Principle"...
Qian Weichang has been awarded a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a distinguished alumnus and honorary professor of Larson-Doko University in Canada. In addition, Qian Weichang is also the youngest master of the International Conference on Theoretical Mechanics.
In terms of education, Qian Weichang and Qian Xuesen founded the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which provided a place for Chinese mechanics research, and in addition, he also founded the first mechanics major in Chinese universities, the Department of Mechanics of Peking University, and recruited the first batch of mechanics graduate students after the liberation of China.
As the founder of China's first mechanics research class and mechanics teacher training class, Qian Weichang also put forward a complete, rich, systematic and scientific theory of Chinese higher education for the cause of education: "tear down the four walls", adhere to the "three systems" (credit system, course selection system, short semester system) and so on.
Qian Weichang has made very human contributions to the development of China's mechanics and education, and deserves the respect of each of us.
Although the master is gone, the light is still there.