article on Lu's work, in which he regretted that "Lu Jia-xi should have had a distinguished career as a mathematician. ... He, however, spent too many years as a high school teacher with virtually no time to do research and virtually no contact with the research community". The seventh paper in the series on disjoint Steiner triple systems treating the cases for the last six values in the theorem, which he had announced to have solved in the Dalian combinatorial mathematics conference, was left unfinished as a 24-page manuscript, with an outline and a few results. (Actually, once the cases for three of the values were proved, the cases for the other three values would follow immediately from previous results.) A few Chinese mathematicians tried to use the procedure sketched in the manuscript or other methods to solve the cases without success. The very last part of the theorem the proof of which Lu had not finished writing down before his death was finally completed by Luc Teirlinck in 1989. Although Teirlinck's proof did not follow the outline in the manuscript, it nevertheless made use of the combinatorial structures that Lu had constructed. Lu Jiaxi was awarded posthumously in 1987 the First Class Award of the State Natural Science Award, then the highest honor in science in China, for his work on large sets of disjoint Steiner triple systems. Bibliography Published papers [An English translation: ] Some unpublished papers See the reference for a more complete list. Book This book contains his published papers and his 1965 paper, with the two papers originally in Chinese translated into English. References 1935 births 1983 deaths 20th-century Chinese mathematicians Amateur mathematicians Combinatorialists Mathematicians from Shanghai Northeast Normal University alumni