Shing-Tung Yau Invites Wang Hong and Deng Yu to Teach Back Home, After 20 Years of Rivalry, Tsinghua and Peking University Realize the Opponent Isn't Each Other
On July 23, the Fields Medal, the highest global mathematics award, was awarded to two Chinese mathematicians, Wang Hong and Deng Yu, both undergraduate classmates from Peking University's class of 2007. This marks the first time mathematicians who completed their undergraduate studies in mainland China have won the prize, with two laureates in the same year.
Following the announcement, renowned mathematician Shing-Tung Yau publicly invited Wang and Deng to return to China to teach at Tsinghua University's Qiuzhen College. This invitation is the latest episode in a decades-long rivalry between Tsinghua and Peking University (PKU) for supremacy in Chinese mathematics. The competition traces back to a 1952 national university restructuring that transferred Tsinghua's entire mathematics department to PKU, leaving Tsinghua without a math program for nearly 30 years until its reinstatement in 1979.
The rivalry intensified in 2005 with a public falling-out between Yau and his former student, PKU professor Gang Tian. Subsequently, Yau shifted his efforts to building Tsinghua's mathematics program from the ground up. He established the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center in 2009 and founded the Qiuzhen College in 2021, implementing an elite, accelerated "Math Leadership Program" to recruit prodigies as young as middle school students.
The competition spans multiple fronts: recruiting top junior high and high school students from math olympiads, luring renowned scholars from overseas, and securing research funding. A new and fierce battleground has emerged in AI and mathematical reasoning. Both universities are heavily investing in AI research to enhance large language models' mathematical capabilities, with Tsinghua collaborating on projects like the STARE algorithm and PKU developing specialized models for geometry.
Despite the intense competition, this rivalry has arguably elevated China's overall standing in mathematics. Chinese mathematicians now frequently publish in top journals and win major international awards. At the recent 17th Yau College Students Mathematics Contests, PKU students swept the top individual awards. Yau, presenting the awards, emphasized the need for inter-university collaboration to advance Chinese mathematics.
The landscape is now shifting with the rise of AI in mathematical research. As AI begins to generate proofs at an unprecedented rate, the traditional metrics of competition between institutions may become less relevant. The future for mathematicians, as noted by Terence Tao, is navigating an era of "proof surplus" driven by AI, presenting a new common challenge that transcends university rivalries.
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