Li Huatian
Chinese computer scientist

Professor Li Huatian (1922–2007) was one of the first few computer scientists in China and was well known for his early contributions to the areas of computer science and computer networks.
Life and work
He was born on January 29, 1922 in Songjiang, Jiangsu (now Songjiang, Shanghai). He graduated from the National Southwestern Associated University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1943 and from Harvard University with a master's degree in 1948.
He returned to China in 1949 to start his research and teaching career as a university professor. He taught at Dalian University of Technology and Northeastern University. He served as the department chair of the departments of Automation and Computer Science and the university vice president at Northeastern University.
He also served as a vice president for IFAC, the International Federation of Automatic Control. He resigned administration positions in 1984 to return to full-time research and teaching. Meanwhile, he founded the first PhD program in computer science in China.
Till his final retirement in 1995, he had published numerous journal papers in areas of automatic control, computer theory, computer networks, and multimedia systems and brought up a lot of younger computer scientists in China.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Li Huatian” is chinese computer scientist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Huatian, Chinese and computer, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6538841. VIAF identifies the subject as 53144605. The Library of Congress control number is n85306123. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 2007, 1943 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Li Huatian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.