Li Tian

Li was born in October 1938 in Jilin City, Jilin province. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1963 with a degree in fluid mechanics.^[2] He was assigned to the then 601 Institute as a technician afterwards, and was banished to western Liaoning during the Cultural Revolution.^[3]

Li was responsible for the aerodynamic projects when developing Shenyang J-8 and Shenyang J-11, he is known as one of the founders of Chinese stealth technology for aircraft. He improved Chinese fighter configurations and stealthy designs by combining electromagnetic scattering characteristics with aerodynamic theory.^[4]

Li was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005.

Li's father, Li Pengshu, taught Chinese literature at a high school. Li was the third of five children. After his mother died in 1948, his father remarried in 1950 and had two more children.^[3] Li died on 11 April 2018 in Shenyang, aged 79.^[1]