Gist of applied mathematics speech lost in chaos

After two rounds of selection by two committees, 85 mathematical essays written in the past five years were selected for the first session of the International Congress of Basic Science held in Beijing last July. Only six of those essays were authored or co-authored by domestic mathematicians.

In comparison, more than 70 of the award-winning essays were authored or co-authored by professors from the United States. There is no reason to suspect any “bias” against Chinese mathematicians, as all the related discussions and academic meetings were conducted by Chinese mathematicians, with open, free, unguided discussions.

That’s a key part of the controversy-stirring speech Shing-tung Yau, a Chinese-American mathematician, who is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, made at Huazhong University of Science and Technology on April 30. His lament at the poor number of Chinese mathematicians getting major international awards was clearly misunderstood.

Particularly, when he said “China’s mathematical research level today has not even caught up with the United States in the 1940s”, he meant China was lagging far behind in international academic influences, innovative capability, as well as talents dedicated to studying maths as a basic science, but unfortunately many just picked on the “1940s” and slammed him for it.

Public opinion today can easily be manipulated using social media platforms. Yau is being blamed for “bashing China”, a charge anyone who has the patience to listen to his speech in its entirety will disagree with. Actually, Yau even said that the Chinese suffer from a Western blockade and vowed to build China into a technological power. He listed the problems hindering the path to growth in order to solve them.

While it’s unfair to pick up few sentences from a speech and make it viral without giving context, it’s necessary to realize that China has been doing quite well in the field of applied mathematics. As early as 2021, Zhang Pingwen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science, who is also the president of the China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, explained in an interview how Huawei spent 10 years on making its 5G technological standard on the basis of polar coding research by Professor Erdal Arikan of Turkiye. China’s contribution in the field of applied mathematics should never be underestimated.