Zhi Bingyi

Zhi was born into a highly educated family in Taizhou County, Jiangsu, on 19 September 1911, while ancestral home in Zhenjiang.[1] He secondary studied at Taizhou High School.[2] In 1931, he was accepted to Zhejiang University, where he majored in the Department of Electrical Engineering.[1] In 1934, he pursued advanced studies in Germany, earning a doctor's degree in natural science from Leipzig University in 1944.[1]

He returned to China in 1946 and that same year was recruited by the Central Industrial Laboratory (中央工业试验所) as an engineer, as well as director of electronic laboratory.[1] From 1947 to 1951, he was professor at Zhejiang University, Tongji University and Shanghai Aviation College.[1]

In 1951, he founded the Yellow River Science and Technology Instrument Factory (黄河理工仪器厂), which was merged into Shanghai Electric Meter Factory (上海电表厂) in 1954.[1] After the institutional reform, he served as deputy chief engineer and director of central laboratory.[1] In 1957, he engaged in the research on aging treatment of manganin resistance elements and solved the quality problem of domestic manganin.[3] He also participated in the development of the first 5-bit DC digital voltmeter in China in the 1960s. In 1964, he was transferred to the Shanghai Institute of Electrical Instruments (上海电工仪器研究所; later reshuffled as Shanghai Instrument Research Institute 上海仪器仪表研究所), where he successively served as chief engineer, deputy director, director, and honorary director.[1] In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, two years later, he was denounced as a "reactionary academic authority" and suffered political persecution.[1] During that time, he "worked on his ideas about a Chinese computer language in a squalid prison cell during the Cultural Revolution, writing his calculations on a teacup after his guards took away even his toilet paper."[4] In September 1969, he was released from an isolation room. He was supervised to sweep the floor, clean the lathe, and then worked as a waste warehouse keeper. In his spare time, he used six years to invent the coding method of Jian Zi Shi Ma (见字识码; 'On-Sight Coding'), which made a great contribution to Chinese character coding and Chinese character information processing.[1]

Zhi wished for an intuitive but unique alphabetic code for Chinese characters. Zhi's predecessors, i.e., Bismarck Doo, Wang Yunwu, and Lin Yutang preferred a shape-based approach to encoding, examining a character's strokes and components and grouping them into categories. However, the official adoption of pinyin made the phonetic approach a national policy. Zhi was able to combine pinyin and a shape-based approach to index characters by their components, using the first letter of each component's pinyin spelling.[5]

He joined the Communist Party in May 1991.

On 24 July 1993, he died of illness in Shanghai, aged 81.[1]

• 1980 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

• Biography of Zhi Bingyi on the official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in Chinese)