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To learn about Professor Liu Huixian
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Biography of Professor Liu Huixian
Professor Liu was born October 18, 1912, in the town
of Lianhua, Jiangxi Province, China. He attended the
Tangshan Jiaotung University, and graduated in 1933 with a
major in Civil and Structural Engineering. He traveled to
the United States of America in 1934 for advanced studies at
Cornell University, and received his Doctorate in 1937. The
outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war soon after prompted him to
return home, to participate and to contribute to the
national effort against Japanese invasion. He participated
in the engineering design and construction of the critical
projects and railroads such as Xiang-Gui (Hunan-Guangxi) and
Qian-GUI (Guizhou-Guangxi). He was a professor of civil
engineering at Zhejiang and Xinan United Universities; and
his original works on load distribution and force analysis
of suspension bridges advanced the state of the art
significantly. After the war, in 1947, Professor Liu
traveled again to the U.S. to begin a successful career in
engineering design and teaching. In reply to the call of
assisting the national reconstruction effort of the war-torn
country when new China was founded in 1949, he went back in
1951 to take on the many challenges of homeland
reconstruction.
Professor Liu had many illustrious posts,
including professorship at Tsinghua University. In
particular, in 1952, he was assigned to the Northeast
Institute of the Academia Sinica, and in that capacity he
founded the Institute of Engineering Mechanics (IEM, known
as the Institute of Civil and Structural Engineering at the
time). Through hard work and perseverance, Professor Liu
built the Institute from the ground up and developed it into
a major center for earthquake engineering research, the
first in China and one that continues to enjoy national and
international renown. In that respect, Professor Liu was
without peers. He was Institute Director for 30 years and
Director Emeritus for eight years—Almost 40 years of
Professor Liu's life were invested in the Institute.
Professor Liu is acknowledged as the founder of
earthquake engineering in China. Among his many outstanding
contributions, Professor Liu was responsible for the
systematic, comprehensive, nation-wide approach to the
development of earthquake engineering research；he was on the
editorial board that published the National Science Master
Plan for the years 1956 through 1967, and wrote the section
on "Earthquake Effects on Buildings, and the Studies of
Mitigation and Counter-Measures"; in his seminal paper on
"Earthquake Loads", published in 1958, he showed the proper
research directions and ways to advance earthquake
engineering research in China; he clarified how earthquake
loads were transmitted to earth dams and developed
sophisticated but practical algorithms to quantify these
loads.
Professor Liu gave top priority to the
post-earthquake investigation and reconnaissance of damage.
He had led many IEM teams to perform on-site evaluations, to
assist the rebuilding effort of the local community while
gaining a better understanding of the devastative
earthquakes. These trips and their findings became the
foundation of his counter-measure ideas. In particular, he
was chief editor of the book "Damage From the Tangshan
Earthquake", a seminal documentation of the event. This work
has received high praises from the earthquake communities in
China and around the world, for its literary excellence and
historic importance. It won top awards in the Advancement of
Technology category from the China Seismological Bureau and
the Central Government, as well as first prize honors for
excellence in the Technology Publication category.
It is under the direction of Professor Liu and
through his direct contributions that the first and second
compilations of the National Seismic Design Standards came
to being (in 1959 and 1964, respectively). The latter is an
especially sophisticated piece of work, on a par with the
state of the art of the day. It uses the measured
acceleration as the basis for design, supplemented by the
structural factor; it uses separate algorithms to quantify
failure of ground and damage due to shaking；and it uses
seismic response spectra that depend on the site condition.
These works would evolve later into the China seismic
Building Codes.
Professor Liu revised the definition of seismic
intensity, after intensive studies of the underlying
physics. Under his direction and participation, a new
intensity scale was set forth. The Earthquake Intensity
Scale of China (1980). This work encapsulates our earthquake
experience since the 1960's; it uses damage index to measure
macro-intensities. Supplemented by first principles, and is
well suited for seismic engineering design applications.
Even when he was in his 80's, Professor Liu was
spearheading the novel and challenging research effort to
incorporate human intelligence in engineering construction
decisions. His ideas on delineating potential sources based
on the hazards, have become the theoretical foundation of
third-generation national seismic zoning procedure.
Professor Liu believed in combining theory with
practice, and in applying and generalizing research findings
to actual engineering projects so they would benefit China's
development, while the applications themselves would in turn
stimulate further scientific growth. This imprint of his can
be seen in the development of structural mechanics in
nuclear reactor applications and many, many earthquake
engineering projects.
The early years of the development of IEM were also
in the difficult periods in the history of China when the
country was plagued by wars and natural disaster and the
country could not afford to provide necessary support for
earthquake engineering research. Professor Liu led his team
to work under extremely difficult conditions with very
limited resources and developed many equipments.
These facilities have played a crucial role in
promoting earthquake engineering research in China.
Professor Liu enjoyed the highest esteem in the world
earthquake engineering community. He led delegations to the
7th, 8th and 9th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering.
He was one of the invited keynote speakers at the 9th World
Conference. His paper entitled “The Sole Course of
Mitigating earthquake Risk” was extremely well received in
the conference. Professor Liu had lectured abroad many
times, and participated in numerous international
conferences. He was on the editorial board of many
international journals, including "Earthquake Engineering
and Structural Dynamics", "Soil Dynamics and Earthquake
Engineering" and "Structural Reliability". He initiated and
fostered many cooperative research programs between China,
U.S., Japan and the former Soviet Union.
Professor Liu attached importance to the reporting
and dissemination of earthquake engineering research
efforts, and the editing and publications of books in his
field. He established the important journal "Earthquake
Engineering and Engineering Vibration'' and served for many
years as its Chief Editor.
Professor Liu also emphasized on educating the young,
coaching the staff and turning them into qualified
scientific researchers. Many experts now actively engaged in
earthquake engineering benefited from the help from
Professor Liu. Among them some had become well-known
scientists, inside and outside China. He had supervised many
Doctorate and Master students. In addition to the staff at
IEM, around one hundred influential scientists in the
earthquake engineering community in China today were once
his students or assistants. His effort has paid off and is
still felt far and wide.
In recognizing Professor Liu's many accomplishments;
he was selected as academician of Academia Sinica in 1980, a
very prestigious position in China recognized by outstanding
achievements. He was included in the International Who's Who
of 1989 by the American Society of Journalism. During the
celebration of his 80th birthday, Professor Makato Watabe,
the noted Japanese earthquake-engineering scholar, called
Professor Liu one of the Fathers of World Earthquake
Engineering along with Professor George Housner of the U. S.
and Professor Muto Kiyoshi of Japan.
Professor Liu was not only an engineer/scientist,
.but also a society activist. He also served as director of
the Society for Disaster Prevention, and Chinese Society of
Earthquake Engineers of China. He was vice managing director
of the Chinese Society of Seismology and chairman of the
Technology Consulting Committee of Harbin.
Professor Liu was modest and prudent, frank and open
in disposition and easily approachable. It is natural that
he commanded respect and devotion of the many he had come in
contact with.
By his deeds, Professor Liu had accomplished the
lofty goals that he set for himself, which can be gleaned
from a poem of his. It reads in part: "I envy the reason for
being of the silk worm； to offer the every last threads of
silk before expiring." Prof. Liu is the role-model for all
of us.
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