Famous crystallographer and academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences Fan Haifu passed away

IT House July 9 news, according to the website of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mr. Fan Haifu, a famous crystallographer, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and researcher of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was invalid due to illness. Beijing passed away at the age of 88.

Mr. Fan Haifu was born in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province in August 1933. He graduated from the Department of Chemistry of Peking University in 1956 and was assigned to work at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in the same year. He has been devoted to the research and application of crystal structure diffraction analysis methodology for a long time, created a component relationship to solve the phase angle problem in crystal diffraction, and introduced the direct method based on this relationship into the analysis of crystal structure for the first time in the world. , realized the resolution expansion of X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy, in biological macromolecular crystal structure analysis method, X-ray free electron laser powder crystal analysis method, electron microscopy image processing, incommensurate modulation crystal structure He has made outstanding achievements and contributions in the design and application of analysis and crystallographic calculation software.

Mr. Fan Haifu was promoted to researcher in 1986 and elected as a member (academician) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991. He was a member of the 14th and 15th International Crystallographic Society Crystallographic Computation Committee. He has won many honors and awards, including the second prize of the National Natural Science Award, the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, the TWAS Physics Award of the Third World Academy of Sciences, the Ho Leung Ho Lee Science and Technology Progress Award, the Chinese Physical Society Ye Qisun Award, and the Tan Kah Kee Mathematical Science Award.

According to Guangming Daily,Fan Haifu is mainly engaged in the research of diffraction analysis methods of material structure at the atomic scale.In the 1960s, he presided over the determination of the crystal structures of the natural amino acids discovered in my country—the pumpkin seed amino acid and the junzi amino acid; in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, he presided over the completion of the research on “direct method to deal with the problem of pseudosymmetry in crystal structure analysis”; From the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s, he presided over the experiment of direct method for protein structure analysis, and obtained the best results of similar research in the world. The method of commensurate modulation structure and combined structure, and cooperated with Li Fanghua to establish a new method of image processing for electron microscopy; from 2000 to present, presided over the establishment of the double-space structure fragment expansion method for structural genomics research, and issued the corresponding computer Procedure OASIS.

Fan Haifu devoted his whole life to scientific research. He once said: There are no “best” scientists in the world, but science needs a large number of people who are willing to do everything possible to make things the best.