Wang Xuan

Wang Xuan graduated in mathematics and mechanics from Peking University and joined its faculty, where by his thirties he was already suffering from severe, recurring illness, including tuberculosis, that kept him bedridden for long periods and left him partially reliant on others to keep working at all. Chinese printing at the time still depended on setting text with tens of thousands of individual lead characters, a process far slower and more labour-intensive than the phototypesetting already used for alphabetic languages, and one that made computerising Chinese text seem almost impossible because of the sheer number of characters involved.

Wang's breakthrough, developed through the 1970s and 1980s, was a mathematical method for compressing the outlines of Chinese characters so they could be stored and reproduced digitally without the enormous data storage that a naive approach would have required, along with the raster image processing needed to output them at high resolution. The resulting laser phototypesetting system let Chinese newspapers and publishers skip directly from hot-metal type to fully digital production.

Within a decade the system had replaced lead type across almost the entire Chinese publishing industry, one of the fastest and most complete technology transitions in the country's history. Wang continued directing research at Peking University's Founder Group, which commercialised the technology, until his death in 2006, having spent much of his career doing the work between hospital stays.