"The time I am happiest is not when I win prizes, but when I have made some breakthroughs on problems that I have thought about for 5 or 10 years. Researching mathematics is different from competitions. In many cases, it is not compared with others, but constantly Explore the unknown. It’s like a star in the sky. When it’s there for a day, you will keep asking what it is and what it looks like on it."
is in Boston, USA, Yun Zhiwei in Boston, USA, with a calm tone. , Z7z He recently won the Simmons Scholar Award. The
Simmons Scholars Award is established by the Simmons Foundation to reward outstanding researchers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astrophysics and computer science. The Simmons Foundation selects Simmons scholars from candidates nominated by scientific research institutions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland each year, and awards 3 to 4 mathematicians each year. Each Simmons scholar will receive a five-year research fund totaling US$500,000, which can be extended for another five years based on the winner’s research influence.
38-year-old Yun Zhiwei is the only Chinese scholar to win the Simmons Scholar Award this year. He is also the fourth Chinese mathematician to receive this honor after Tao Zexuan, Yao Hongze, and Chen Xiuxiong.
And he, is also a mathematician who went out from Tianning. Yun Zhiwei grew up in Tianning, elementary school in bureau elementary school, junior high school and senior high school in the province.
"Probably in the third grade of elementary school, the mathematics teacher assigned a thinking question almost every day. These questions need to be thought for a while before they can come up. Some questions can be solved, and some can't be solved. Gradually, I start to like it. Mathematics." Yun Zhiwei said, learning mathematics is not mountain climbing, because there is always time to climb a mountain. On the contrary, it is more like digging a treasure underground, endless and endless.
In 2000, Yun Zhiwei, a sophomore in high school, was successfully selected for the 41st International Mathematical Olympiad China National Training Team. In July of the same year, he successfully entered the 41st International Mathematical Olympiad in Daejeon, South Korea, and won the only gold medal for the Chinese team with a perfect score. Yun Zhiwei was therefore successfully transferred to the Department of Mathematics of Peking University.
"This math competition gave me confidence and confirmed that I can do mathematics. In fact, I entered mathematics seriously and formally only after I was in college."
is in Peking University, He has 19 subjects with 100 points and 7 subjects with 99 points. Yun Zhiwei began to be called "Yun Shen".
reached the senior year, Yun Zhiwei chose algebraic geometry as his research direction. "It is like a building, very exquisite. It was built by other mathematicians and displayed, but if you build it by yourself, you won't be able to build it for a while, and you will be attracted by its theoretical framework."
graduated from Peking University Later, he went to the Department of Mathematics of Princeton University to continue his studies. Five years later, he successfully obtained his doctorate.
Yun Zhiwei said that there are many different directions in mathematics, roughly divided into two kinds, one is the study of continuous mathematics, the other is the study of discrete mathematics. In engineering physics, including finance, continuous mathematics is the most used. Discrete mathematics is more pure, like number theory, and some are related to computers. "These two types of mathematics have completely different requirements for people's thinking. I am divergent. Every mathematician will clearly feel which side he is on after a certain period of time."
some of his research results in recent years Achievement has continuously refreshed the height of young Chinese mathematicians. In December 2012, the Chinese name Yun Zhiwei spread throughout the entire "mathematics world". He won the Ramanu Gold Award for his outstanding contributions in the fields of representation theory, algebraic geometry and number theory. On the podium, the judges commented that "At the age of 30, he has become a young leader in modern mathematics."
Five years later, Yun Zhiwei, then a professor at Yale University, collaborated with Peking University student Zhang Weiyin. The higher-order terms of Taylor's expansion of the L function provided a geometric explanation, and won the "New Vision Mathematics Award" for young scholars in the "Science Breakthrough Award" of the United States. The Science Breakthrough Award, known as the "Oscar of the scientific community", aims to recognize the world's top scientists.
35-year-old Yun Zhiwei also successfully became a tenured professor of MIT, and that year, the famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen also became a tenured professor of MIT at the age of 35. mathematicsThere is no laboratory at home. He spends most of the day doing math problems like middle school students.
Doing research is lonely, and doing mathematics research is not well known, and most of the time it is not going well. "It's not that I can solve one problem every day. It's good to be able to solve one problem in a year. You think about it every day, but there is no progress for more than a month. It is possible. So most of the time we do learning You must have this kind of mentality. You have to accept that 99% of the time there is no breakthrough."
Currently, Yun Zhiwei has discovered some new phenomena in the cooperation with Zhang Wei. "But in this phenomenon, what we have actually made is only the tip of the iceberg. There are still many more difficult questions waiting for us to do. These are the issues to be considered next."
Because his parents live in Changzhou, Yun Zhiwei has an epidemic situation. I basically came back once a year or two before. He often returns to the bureau’s elementary school and the provincial permanent middle school to have discussions with his younger brothers and sisters to share learning experience and experience; often returns to Peking University, Tsinghua University and other domestic universities for academic exchanges and seminars, and participates in domestic college mathematics in different ways Discipline construction and talent training. In his own way, he hopes that more and more people will learn mathematics and fall in love with it. The author of this article丨Tu Xianping and Shao Yulin
