Zhou Yulin is a native of Shanghai. He was born in 1923 and his ancestral home is in Zhenhai, Zhejiang Province. Zhou graduated from the Math Department of Datong University of Shanxi Province and received a doctorate degree from Moscow University in 1957.

Zhou\'s achievements in theoretical and application math have won him widespread acclaim, culminating in receiving the Hua Luogeng Math Prize. His research on the Landau-Lifshitz equation attracted worldwide attraction, and he compiled significant results in computation math, liquid mechanics, and computation methods.

He was a researcher at the Beijing Application Physics and Computation Math Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In 1991, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.