Guan Dinghua was born on Oct. 25, 1927 in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1949. After his graduation from the Electrical Engineering Department of Tsinghua University in 1950, he was sent to Soviet Russia to strive for his D.S. degree. Since his return to our country, he has been working in Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IACAS). In view of his hard work and outstanding achievements, he was appointed as the director of our institute in 1987. At the same time, he held many social positions, such as the standing president of Chinese Acoustical Society, vice-president of Chinese Society of Oceanology, the deputy director of the academic committee of the National Key Sound Fields and Sound Information Laboratory, the academic committee director of the Ocean Remote Sensing Key Laboratory, and Chairman of International Oceanology Seminar (96 Workgroup).

Prof. Guan was a respectable scientist. He set foot in a good many fields of acoustic researches. In his early studies, he was engaged in electroacoustics and architectural acoustics, sound transmission in shallow sea, oceanic acoustic remote sensing and so on. In recent years, he stepped into the fields of speech research, man-machine dialogue and speech synthesis. He was the first one to put forward the inverse method of seabed reflection loss. He also applied his shallow water reverberation theory to getting the reflection and scatterance coefficients. As regards to sound wave research, he analyzed the sudden decline of transverse correlation and brought forward the new method of seabed sound measurement and recognition. Moreover, Prof. Guan was in charge of many projects affiliated to Key Technologies R&D Program and "863 Program". He was granted many honors by the country and CAS.

Prof. Guan not only devoted himself to the practical researches but also paid attention to the theoretical studies. In all his life, he has published more than 60 academic papers and works. He was even recorded in the "Encyclopedia of China" and "World VIP". He was also very enthusiastic about the popular science enterprise. Besides composing some related books, he had delivered a speech called "The Prosperous Future of Acoustics" for the middle school teachers in Dongwan City, Guangdong Province. The speech was warmly welcomed by the audience. All this has conveyed the great concerns to the science and technology education and the care and love to the young people from Chinese scientists of older generation.