Birthday profile

Hao Wang (academic)

Hao Wang, Chinese-American logician, philosopher, and mathematician (died 1995)

Born
May 20, 1921
Died
May 13, 1995
Zodiac sign
Taurus
Birth year
1921

About Hao Wang (academic)

Hao Wang (Chinese: 王浩; pinyin: Wáng Hào; 20 May 1921 – 13 May 1995) was a Chinese-American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and commentator on Kurt Gödel. == Biography == Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China (today in the People's Republic of China), Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a B.S. degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic under W. V. O. Quine at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appointed to an assistant professorship at Harvard the same year. During the early 1950s, Wang studied with Paul Bernays in Zürich. In 1956, he was appointed Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 1959, Wang wrote on an IBM 704 computer a program that in only 9 minutes mechanically proved several hundred mathematical logic theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. In 1961, he was appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Mathematical Logic and Applied Mathematics at Harvard. From 1967 until 1991, he headed the logic research group at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he was professor of logic.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Hao Wang (academic) timeline

  1. The first noted example of aperiodic tiling is a set of Wang tiles, whose nonexistence Wang had once conjectured, discovered by his student Robert Berger in 1966.
  2. In 1972, Wang joined in a group of Chinese American scientists led by Chih-Kung Jen as the first such delegation from the U.S. to the People's Republic of China.

The world when Hao Wang (academic) was born

Hao Wang (academic) was born in 1921. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1921

  • #1 song"My Man" – Fanny Brice
  • Top movieThe Kid (Charlie Chaplin)
  • Best-selling bookMain Street – Sinclair Lewis

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentJack Dempsey vs Georges Carpentier — first million-dollar gate
  • Top headlineWarren G. Harding inaugurated as 29th President
  • Technology milestoneAlbert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics
  • Defining fadOuija boards
  • Notable inventionLie detector (polygraph)
  • World population1.88 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWarren G. Harding
  • Sports championNew York Giants (World Series)
  • U.S. population108.5M

1921 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Hao Wang (academic)'s birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19212026
Gas$0.26$3.45/gal
Average home$5,500$435,000
Average income$3,010$67,500
Movie ticket$0.15$11.95
Postage stamp$0.02$0.73
Population108.5M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.