Lin Yutang

Also known as Lîm Gí-tông

Chinese inventor, novelist and philosopher (1895–1976)

AI overview

Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer, inventor, and thinker who lived from 1895 to 1976 and became known for bridging Eastern and Western cultures through his novels and philosophical works. He matters because he helped introduce Chinese thought and literature to Western audiences during a transformative period in modern history.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works: 44

Top works

The Wisdon Of Confucius
On The Wisdom of America
Lin Yutang Wisdom Of India
Imperial Peking
MOMENT IN PEKING

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1980-01-16

broadwaydisneyhip hopmusicaltheatre

Discography

Warriors2024

Official site Discogs Stream

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows
· 2021 · cited 29,335x
Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context
· 2014 · cited 26,141x
Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection
· 2017 · cited 24,339x
Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection
· 2017 · cited 24,052x
LIBSVM
· 2011 · cited 22,396x

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Quotes

“I like to think of criticism as the highest intellectual effort that mankind is capable of, and above all, I like to think of self-criticism as the most difficult attainment of an educated man.”
“All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.”
“Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion—our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.”
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
“The Chinese believe that when there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.”
“I strongly suspect that the average reader does not suspect India has as rich a culture, as creative an imagination and wit and humor as any China has to offer, and that India was China’s teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world’s teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.”

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Key facts

Born: ( 1895-10-10 ) 10 October 1895, Banzai, Fujian , Qing China
Died: 26 March 1976 (1976-03-26) (aged 80), British Hong Kong
Education: St. John's University, Shanghai ( BA ) Harvard University Leipzig University ( PhD )
Occupations: Linguist, novelist, philosopher, translator
Spouse: Lin Tsui-feng (née Liao)
Children: Adet Lin Lin Tai-yi Lin Hsiang-ju
Traditional chinese: 林語堂
Simplified chinese: 林语堂
Hanyu pinyin: Lín Yǔtáng
Bopomofo: ㄌㄧㄣˊ ㄩˇ ㄊㄤˊ
Gwoyeu romatzyh: Lin Yeutarng
Wade giles: Lin Yü -tʻang
Ipa: [li ̌ n y ̀ .tʰa ̌ ŋ]
Jyutping: Lam4 jyu5-tong4
Hokkien poj: Lîm Gí-tông

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Family name: Lin
Gender: male
Citizenship: Taiwan
Place of birth: Banzai
Place of death: British Hong Kong
Occupation: novelist
Educated at: St. John's University
Employer: Peking University
Languages spoken: German
Religion: Presbyterianism
Academic degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Doctoral advisor: August Conrady
Field of work: English-language literature
Official website: www.linyutang.org.tw
Image: Linyutang.jpg

Show 6 more facts

date of birth: 1895-10-10
date of death: 1976-03-26
Commons category: Lin Yutang
nominated for: Nobel Prize in Literature
place of burial: Taipei
writing language: Chinese

Sources (3)

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Encyclopedic overview

Lin Yutang (10 October 1895 – 26 March 1976) was a Chinese writer, linguist, and inventor. A prolific bilingual writer in both Chinese and English, he was celebrated for pioneering a humorous prose style in modern Chinese literature and for serving as a cultural bridge between China and the West, most notably through My Country and My People (1935) and his English translations of Chinese classics. As a linguist, he compiled a series of ESL textbooks for Chinese learners in the 1930s and later produced an English–Chinese dictionary in the 1970s. As an inventor, he designed a Chinese typewriter, which was patented in the United States in 1952, though it was never mass-produced. From 1940 to 1973, Lin received six nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Lin Yutang” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.