Born in Shanghai, Lin trained as an engineer. His passion was bridges, and to make them better he used prestressed concrete, which uses embedded high-tension steel cables to allow more economical and better-looking building techniques.
During his career, he oversaw the constructions of thousands of bridges, including a thousand in China alone. His ideas spread when he turned to teaching: he was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley from 1946 to 1976 — his alma mater (he got a graduate degree there in 1933). He also designed an elevated roadway into San Francisco International Airport.
When President Ronald Reagan presented Lin the National Medal of Science in 1986, he shocked the President by presenting him with a design for an “Intercontinental Peace Bridge” across the Bering Strait, linking the U.S. with the USSR. “You spend money on bombs, and in 10 years they’re out of date,” he said later. “But you build bridges, they last forever.” He died November 15 at home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 91.