WHEN I FIRST SET FOOT in the United States in 1969, as a twenty-year-old who’d never ventured far from home, I was struck more than anything by the stunningly blue sky—its clarity and crispness providing hope that I might soon be able to see farther, and that perhaps the secrets of mathematics would someday be revealed to me.
My reaction upon arriving in China a decade later—my first visit to the country since I was an infant, oblivious to his surroundings—was much more visceral and instinctual. I bent down to touch the soil, as if trying to make a connection with the ground from which my ancestors had arisen and I had later sprung forth. Acting on impulse, I was reaching out to the land I’d heard so much about, and was such an important part of my being, but had never before spent a moment in as a self-aware individual. While I’m not normally given to big displays of emotion—and am known, if anything, for my stoic bearing—that experience left me shaken.
Flash forward to the present: I now regularly travel back and forth between China and the United States at least a few times each year. The experience has become almost routine, though with each visit I learn something more about the two places I feel most at home in, though never fully so. I’m no social critic and am not referring here to any grand insights into these two profoundly different cultures. I just might notice some small quirks or minor annoyances that distinguish the two milieus in ways that hadn’t registered before.
Some parts of my daily regimen are the same no matter where I happen to be, whereas other parts of my life can be utterly different. At the time of this writing, in the fall of 2017, I find myself in Beijing, spending a sabbatical year at the Mathematical Sciences Center of Tsinghua University that bears my name (which could prove helpful, I suppose, in the event of a momentary identity lapse, as there are plenty of reminders around). While I’ve never been a coffee drinker, I do like to start my day with a strong cup of tea, preferably of the Chinese variety, of which I always keep an ample supply on hand, and that’s pretty much a constant wherever I go. My general approach to mathematics is another thing that does not change, regardless of whether I’m operating on China Standard Time or back at Harvard on Eastern Standard Time or somewhere in between, such as Greenwich Mean Time.
But on a practical level, I do notice appreciable differences between the two countries. For one thing, I have many more colleagues I can work with in the U.S. than in China. Collaborations have always been important to my research, and in America I’ve been able to team up with brilliant mathematicians from all over the world—a situation that would be hard to match anywhere else. In China, there’s a much smaller pool of people with whom I can have mutually beneficial exchanges of ideas. Also in China, Google searches are essentially banned, and e-mail communications are sometimes restricted—nuisances, for sure, though nothing that changes my life and work habits in a fundamental way.
Dealing with the university administrators, however, is totally different in America than in China. If I make a request of some sort at Harvard, for instance, I typically get a note from a dean that spells out in unequivocal terms what I can or cannot do. There’s room for subsequent discussion, and perhaps clarification, but the process tends to be quite straightforward. In China, the opposite is often true.
As an example, my former graduate student Kefeng Liu filled me in on his visit in the early 1990s with S. S. Chern at the Chern Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University. Liu had gone to Nankai not long after Chern, the institute’s founding director, had stepped down from his post. A new director was hired in 1992, but Chern still had a big role in overseeing the center. I asked Liu how Chern was doing. “He’s fine,” Liu said, “but unhappy.” Liu found this perplexing because the new director was doing everything Chern had asked for. Liu’s confusion stemmed from the fact that he didn’t understand the Chinese way of doing things, which is perhaps best described as byzantine: Venerated scholars, highly respected by the government, may say one thing publicly when they are really, and secretly, pushing for another outcome, which they don’t feel comfortable saying out loud until others make the case for them.
While the new director thought he was complying with Chern’s wishes, he was actually doing the opposite of what Chern wanted—hence Chern’s gloomy disposition. This story line follows the old-fashioned Chinese approach, which I consider to be a peculiar and rather circuitous way of doing business. Chern, as far as I could tell, didn’t think there was anything wrong with this system; he appeared to accept the status quo. Liu, however, had no clue as to what was going on beneath the surface.
When I talk to university administrators in China in my capacity as the director of several math centers, I usually find them to be quite polite. The people I deal with—deans, department chairs, university presidents, and so forth—tend to promise all sorts of things, in conversation though not in writing. But when it comes time to carry out those pledges, they often are unable, or unwilling, to follow through.
Tsinghua University, where I’m presently stationed, is somewhat of an exception—and better in this respect than most Chinese universities—having adopted a management style that more closely follows the Western approach. Nevertheless, the academic system in China is more complicated because major universities are under the control of the government through the Ministry of Education. Leadership changes at universities, which happen periodically, can result in significant upheaval. When new people come in, they don’t want to do what their predecessors agreed to because in that case the successors won’t get much credit. They want to have something new to show their superiors, which means doing something different, even if that means curtailing a successful program and replacing it with an ineffectual one. This introduces an element of uncertainty to operations in Chinese universities that does not exist in their U.S. counterparts.
Every university in the United States, to be sure, has its own internal politics—the inevitable squabbles within departments, between departments, and between the faculty and administration. But when the country as a whole elects a new president, that doesn’t usually affect anything at the campus level—unless, of course, major funding cuts or policy shifts are instituted as a result of a change at the top.
Given the closer ties to government found in Chinese institutions of higher learning, Chinese academics have far greater incentives to move up the ladder of political authority. Within this hierarchy, all members of the university administration have a ranked level attached to them. You’ll get a more generous salary and preferential treatment at, say, a hospital or an airport the higher the number you’ve been assigned.
Ding Shisun, the former mathematics chair at Peking University, went on to become president of the university and then chairman of the China Democratic League, one of the country’s eight “democratic” parties. Ding, accordingly, has wielded a lot of power in his career. He used his influence, among other things, to aid the rise to power of my former student Gang Tian, who now holds a part-time professorship at Peking University from which he received a master’s degree before earning a PhD at Harvard under my direction. Tian is also a high-ranking official in an advisory body known as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and he recently became a vice president of Peking University, which places him at the deputy minister level within the Chinese establishment. With this appointment, Tian became a potent force at Peking University, poised to take over the reins from Ding, who is now ninety years old.
Tian let me know early on that his ambitions went well beyond mathematics. He told me in 2001, as we sat in the Boston Common, that he someday hoped be a leader in China, eventually becoming one of the most powerful people in the country. I was content with a career in mathematics, but I try to stand by my students and help them with their careers, even if the choices they make and paths they choose don’t always accord with mine.
I wish that relations between Tian and me hadn’t deteriorated so badly, and ideally I wish we could be on better terms. But before a full reconciliation can happen, I would like to see him make amends for practices that strike me as improper. Simon Donaldson and his colleagues, for example, have accused Tian of appropriating their ideas without providing suitable attribution to their prior work. It seems to me that advances in Tian’s career may have been hastened by behavior on his part that I consider questionable, especially in China where academic standards have not always been so rigorous as in the West.
In the United States, progress in academia is largely based on scholarly work—how good you are at what you do. But in China, political gravitas plays a bigger role, which has prompted many academics—including those in the realm of mathematics—to give short shrift to research, focusing instead on more direct means of moving up in the pecking order. And the surest path to power is by becoming an “academician”—the highest academic title in the land, a lifelong honor conferred by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to about 750 scholars in science and math and about 850 members of the Academy of Engineering.
The U.S. counterpart, the National Academy of Sciences, was established in 1863, long before the 1949 founding of the Chinese Academy. The NAS currently has about twenty-three hundred members, and I’ve been a member myself for the past twenty-five years. While it’s definitely an honor, the NAS designation has a relatively minor bearing on one’s life in a material sense. Not so in China, where academicians get many of the same perks granted to high-ranking Communist Party officials, such as private rooms at hospitals and access to VIP lounges at airports. If you’re important enough to be called a “leader of China,” entire rail cars can be set aside for you, and you’ll be rewarded with a more comfortable income as well. Beyond these and other individual benefits, there are more far-reaching effects. In China, most people will agree with something if enough academicians say it’s true. If you don’t have any academicians on your research panel, that panel won’t carry much weight in the eyes of the government. If, on the other hand, three or more academicians write a joint letter to the government, that letter is likely to land on the desk of the premier.
Just as a university’s stature depends on how many academicians are on its faculty, a city’s measure of academic excellence depends on how many academicians live there. A faraway province in Tibet might have only two or three academicians; a request made by one of them has to be taken seriously because if he or she threatens to leave, the province as a whole will have diminished status. Therefore, almost nobody dares to offend an academician. They are treated like royalty, without necessarily having done much to earn their lofty titles (and in that respect they might be like royalty too).
The people in charge of the Chinese academic world have rather limited judgment regarding those who excel in their field, or not, and they often refuse to seek advice from outside authorities. There are not enough experts in China to do the necessary assessments, and many of those with expertise can be bought off with favors offered by the applicants and their sponsors. This can lead to some dubious choices regarding who gets into the academy.
Because I do not reside in China, nor do I have a Chinese passport, I don’t have the right to vote for new members of the Chinese Academy. But I was consulted around twenty years ago regarding the candidacy of a Chinese mathematician who worked in the field of dynamical systems. This candidate, incidentally, happened to be the brother-in-law of a senior member of the academy. He also had the enthusiastic support of another dynamicist, a Chinese-American mathematician, who asked me to help push his friend’s appointment through.
I wasn’t familiar with the candidate’s work, so I asked some of the world’s top experts in dynamical systems—including Michael Herman and John Mather—as to how good they thought he was. Their verdict was that his work was only about average, even in China. I passed these letters on to the Chinese Academy president, who in turn brought the matter up for debate by the election committee. The aforementioned senior academy member, who participated in this discussion, argued that the letters should be disregarded because the writers were not Chinese. These matters, he insisted, should be handled by Chinese people, and Chinese people alone. His view prevailed. The candidate (his brother-in-law) was duly elected an academician and, a few years later, became president of the Chinese Mathematical Society.
Because of the prevalence of lobbying—and a tendency among members to vote for their friends, allies, family members, and anyone else they think it might be advantageous to support—intellectual prowess is often a secondary factor when it comes to the selection of academicians in China. As a result, too many academy members care little about research; their primary concern seems to be pursuing personal advancement by making other people happy.
This arrangement is far from ideal. Many observers believe, as do I, that one of the major obstacles for the development of science in China is the academicians themselves—the people who, above all others, are supposed to be the exemplars of scholarly achievement throughout the land.
Since my primary residence is in the United States, I am not eligible to be an academician, not that I ever tried or cared to become one. However, I was named a foreign associate of the academy in 1995, which was when the category was introduced. C. N. Yang became a foreign associate at the same time, as he was then living in the United States, holding the Albert Einstein Chair at Stony Brook University.
Tian became an academician in 2001. He had tried to gain admittance earlier but was not eligible because of his full-time academic appointment in the United States. After Tian promised to return to China on a full-time basis—a vow that would have been difficult to fulfill, given his faculty position at Princeton (which was later reduced to half time)—his admission to the Chinese Academy was formally taken up. The discussions about candidates, including Tian’s case, went on for several days, and Tian did not have a clear majority. So K. C. Chang, who supervised Tian’s master’s degree work at Peking University, along with one or two other academicians, violated the normal protocol by dispatching someone to the home of a member who was too ill to be at the meeting. This member (who had a high fever) was then brought to the meeting just long enough to vote for Tian, although he should not have been allowed to cast a ballot because, according to the academy’s rules, he first would have needed to attend most of the prior discussions. Yet it was by virtue of that single vote—made as a result of a last-minute rousting and some rule bending—that Tian got into the Chinese Academy.
About a decade earlier, Chern was pushing for his Berkeley associate Wu-Yi Hsiang to become an academician at the prestigious Academia Sinica (a predecessor to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which moved to Taiwan in 1949, just before the Communist takeover). In 1991, Hsiang claimed to have proved a famous problem posed 380 years earlier by the astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler’s conjecture, also called the “sphere packing problem,” concerns the densest way to stack round objects (or spheres) in a square box. If those round objects happened to be oranges, all of the same size, the question comes down to this: What arrangement would allow you to fit the most oranges into the box? The optimal configuration, Kepler posited, would be one in which each orange sits in the hole formed by three oranges below it, with each orange in the middle of the box (though not along the edges) touching six others in total. David Hilbert repeated the question in 1900 with slightly modified wording, labeling it number eighteen on his widely heralded list of unsolved mathematical problems.
This was the problem Hsiang alleged to have cracked—a challenge, he said, that led him to develop a host of new tools in spherical geometry. His paper, “On the Sphere Packing Problem and the Proof of Kepler’s Conjecture,” appeared in the October 1993 issue of the International Journal of Mathematics. Chern felt that electing Hsiang to the Chinese Academy would be a just reward for this achievement. He vigorously recommended Hsiang’s admittance in a meeting with other academicians; Wu-Chung Hsiang also spoke enthusiastically about the candidacy of his younger brother.
Some participants in that discussion, who still needed further convincing, sought my opinion. I recommended a more cautious stance that relied on the views of outside experts in addition to the endorsements of close friends and family members. As it turned out, the top authorities on the subject, John Conway (of Princeton), Thomas Hales (then at the University of Michigan), and Neil Sloane (then at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory) all found Hsiang’s argument to be unsound—containing “serious flaws,” according to Conway and Sloane, and having “major gaps and errors,” according to Hales. In view of these statements, I said it would be hard to support Hsiang’s entrance to the academy on the basis of his work on this problem; Hsiang did not get in when the vote was subsequently held.
A month or so later, when I was visiting the Chinese University of Hong Kong, C. N. Yang called me into his office. “You have offended your teacher, Chern,” he said, because my comments had gone against Chern’s wishes. I replied that I didn’t say anything until asked and then felt obliged to answer honestly. “All you had to say was that the proof was right!” countered Yang, before promptly kicking me out of his office.
And that provides a clue as to how some Chinese academics behave: While I believe that the truth in mathematics is not subject to our personal will or ambitions—that it is part of the natural order and therefore inviolable—others may take a different view, one in which expedience has a place and can, if necessary, trump scientific fact.
In 2017, at the age of ninety-four, Yang became a full-fledged academician within the Chinese Academy where he previously had been just a foreign member. His appointment was big news in China, and with this new title he became more influential in Chinese academic circles than ever.
That influence, of course, was based on real substance—some very important achievements in physics. The ideas Yang developed with Robert Mills, generalizing the fundamental work of Hermann Weyl from the late 1920s, culminated in the “Yang-Mills theory,” which occupies a central place in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model, in turn, successfully encapsulates our current knowledge of the observed universe, describing all the particles that have been seen in nature and the interactions between them. Ironically, Yang has expressed reservations about some critical aspects of that overarching theoretical framework and never seemed fully comfortable with it. Even so, his accomplishments with Mills, along with his separate Nobel Prize–winning work with Lee, were still towering feats, and particle physics has benefited greatly in their wake.
For some reason, Yang was motivated to write a letter in 2003 to the chair of the physics department at Tsinghua University, BangFen Zhu, recommending that “there must not be any additions of new faculty in particle physics [or] nuclear physics. Existing faculty in these areas should be encouraged to change to other fields.” The reason Yang cited for this policy edict was that his field was “dying,” although others might counter that Yang—whose famous work with Mills had taken place a half century earlier—had long been out of touch with developments in the field. In 2012, nine years after Yang submitted this letter, the Higgs boson was discovered, constituting a monumental finding in particle physics. In the same year, a new kind of neutrino oscillation was discovered in a Chinese laboratory, which held major implications for why the universe is dominated by matter rather than by antimatter. These and other accomplishments suggest that reports regarding the death of particle physics were, to quote the humorist Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated.”
In 2016, Yang wrote an article titled “China Should Not Build a Super-Collider Now.” A large group of prominent physicists from China, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had been enthusiastically calling for the construction in China of the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider—a machine intended to serve as a successor to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. I played an active role in backing this effort because I believe the project would be good for China, good for physics, good for international relations, and even good for mathematics, as breakthroughs in fundamental physics have long served as a fruitful source of ideas for mathematicians. The converse is also true, and it’s fair to say that both fields have benefited from this cross-pollination.
Yang, however, dismissed this whole endeavor—aimed at understanding the universe on the smallest, most basic scales—as “a bottomless money sink.” He even went so far as to force the cancellation of a November 2016 lecture scheduled to be delivered at Tsinghua University by Yifang Wang, the director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was spearheading the Chinese collider project. Yang was able to pull the plug on this lecture at the last minute, even after posters publicizing the event had been plastered all over the Tsinghua campus and elsewhere in town. Wang instead gave a well-attended public lecture on the collider—which is currently in the research and development phase—at Peking University in December 2016.
I believe that Yang’s motives are good and that he’s genuinely trying to promote physics as he sees fit, but I also feel that a person in his mid-nineties, far removed from active research in his field, should not hold so much sway over other, younger physicists and over scientific research in general. This strikes me as a manifestation of an endemic problem in Chinese science and society at large: Despite gains made in recent decades by young researchers, the oldest people still hold the most power—a fact that’s especially true among academicians.
There is, of course, a rather durable historical tradition at play here. The Chinese dictum “respect your elders” dates back at least twenty-five-hundred years to the time of Confucius. This attitude is formalized in the doctrine of “filial piety,” which considers it an obligation and a virtue to honor one’s parents, elders, and ancestors. I, too, subscribe to this notion, which is deeply entrenched in Chinese culture. I’ve always tried to live my life in a way that both my mother and father would approve of, and by and large, I think I’ve done all right on that score.
Nevertheless, that same attitude can, and frequently does, go too far, to the detriment of society at large. In the United States, most people over seventy do not hold much sway in the academic world. But not in China, where “the older the better” tends to be the rule.
Yang, to take one example, is clearly a scientist of the first rank, a commanding figure in his field. In addition to contributing so much to physics directly, the 1957 Nobel Prize that he shared with T. D. Lee gave confidence throughout China that even people from that country, which lagged far behind the United States, European nations, and Japan, could still achieve greatness on the worldwide stage. The importance of that feat cannot be overestimated. But it’s also clear to me that it’s long past time for people of his generation to loosen their grip on Chinese science so that younger researchers have a chance to step up and make their own marks.
I have enormous respect for Chern, too. He was unquestionably a great mathematician who made huge contributions to geometry. He built up the math departments at Chicago and Berkeley and founded MSRI, while furthering the careers of so many people, including me. For that I am forever grateful. I’m also deeply disappointed that we never managed to heal the rift between us. But in the late 1970s—about a decade after I first arrived at Berkeley with his help—I felt the need to go my own way, and I don’t think Chern ever forgave me for that. And those ill feelings toward me were not limited to Chern. In China, almost everyone holds it against you if they think you’re rebelling against your teacher—even if you’re not rebelling at all, but just trying to assert yourself and realize your own goals.
To me, there’s little doubt that the research culture in China has been held back by the dominance of the old guard, steeped in traditional ways of doing things that are anachronistic in the modern era. And this problem has only been compounded by the corrupting influence of the academicians.
Does this mean the situation is hopeless? I don’t think so, or otherwise I would not be spending so much time running a half dozen mathematics centers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, nor would I devote myself to other math and science causes there. Because in the end I believe change will come and that it cannot be held back. In a word, I’m betting on youth. To me, it seems inevitable, as well as natural, that young leaders in math and science, who bring fresh perspectives to their fields, will emerge and gradually gain influence, in time having a transformative effect on academia as a whole.
I’m trying to foster this process by doing things differently, and establishing a true meritocracy, at the Chinese centers I run. And we should be able to do that as long as we can keep the funding going, which is one reason I continue to raise money from private donors. These centers are mainly populated with younger mathematicians—who are well before the age when one would ordinarily think about becoming an academician—and I’m helping them appreciate the rewards that come from doing excellent work, divorced from any political concerns.
That appears to be the case at the Tsinghua center, where we’ve assembled a large and capable group that is turning out high-quality research. If we can maintain a critical mass of people who share this work ethic, we might be able to establish a foothold in China that serves as an example for other math and science institutes. But it will be a struggle. When we have tried to draw attention to the work of our young scholars at the Tsinghua mathematics center, a few leaders at Peking University’s school of mathematics seemed determined to suppress that well-earned recognition.
Although there will always be those whose main concern is money and power, I suspect that a growing number of youthful researchers have come to view academic achievement as the most important thing. And that could be the future of mathematics in China as others come to adopt this attitude as well.
Rather than focusing solely on university students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior professors, I’m also helping Chinese high school students get a taste of real research by initiating in 2008 the High School Mathematics Award. The program is modeled after the U.S.-based Science Talent Search first sponsored by the Westinghouse Corporation and then by the Intel Corporation and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. The idea was not to have students compete to solve the standard problems presented in the annual Math Olympiad contests but rather to encourage creativity and collaboration by allowing students the freedom to work on problems of their own choosing that will take time, effort, and ingenuity to solve.
These competitions are part of a broader attempt on my part to counteract years of education in a rigid system in which Chinese students are trained to memorize things—to be passive receptacles that do whatever their teacher says. But true research is something else altogether. It’s not just solving the problems your teacher gives to you but moving ahead of your teacher, at least in the particular area you’re investigating.
I have no doubts that Chinese students can become more inventive, like their American peers, if they are given the encouragement and space to think independently. That’s what these competitions are all about, with winners picked on the basis of their creativity as well as proficiency.
In 2013, the High School Physics Awards were launched in China, and in 2016, Science Awards were introduced in biology and chemistry. Every year, distinguished scientists—physicists like Nima Arkani-Hamed, Brian Greene, and David Gross (a Nobel laureate), and mathematicians like John Coates and Terry Tao (a Fields medalist)—have traveled to China to serve as judges.
About two thousand students from 850 teams and three hundred schools compete in a typical year. In 2015, for example, one-third of the twenty-four mathematics award winners were admitted to elite colleges abroad. Not so long ago, I might have doubted whether any of those students would return to China after completing their studies, but that situation has changed. Thanks to a rapidly expanding national economy, which has sustained annual growth rates above 10 percent for the better part of three decades, salaries in China are becoming increasingly competitive. As a result, I’ve had an easier time getting talented people to work in my math centers, and I believe this trend applies nationwide.
Despite the problems I have catalogued regarding China’s higher educational system, in some ways the country is doing better than the United States. For example, in recent decades, the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, posing a huge drain to the economy. Meanwhile, research and development funding in science and math has languished. China, however, has generally managed to steer clear of such prolonged and costly military engagements. This has made more money available for domestic spending—to build up the infrastructure, raise living standards, and boost funding in science and technology research. While U.S. universities are still vastly superior, each side has something to learn from the other.
I try to take the best of both cultures, approaching some problems from a Western vantage point and others from an Eastern perspective. I’ve been heavily influenced by Chinese culture and find myself becoming fonder of reading Chinese literature and history than ever before. I even write poetry (in Chinese characters) from time to time to express my feelings or frustrations, or simply to relax.
This grounding in Chinese tradition and pastimes, which seems to be an inextricable part of my being, makes me different from my American peers. Yet it’s also a fact that I’ve been in the United States for almost fifty years, which makes me different from my Chinese peers as well. The best parts of Chinese culture were passed on to me by my father—who taught me Confucianism, Taoism, and his personal code of ethics—and by my mother. Yu-Yun and I, in turn, have tried to pass on some of these ideas and values to our sons, who I’m pleased to see have grown up to become nice, as well as accomplished, young men with families of their own.
Although “respect your elders” can go too far, and pose unnecessary obstacles to younger generations, it clearly can be a positive principle as well. Chinese children are trained to stay loyal to their family and friends. Rather than being cast aside, older people are more closely integrated into society and therefore made to feel more secure than is often the case in the West, where elderly folks are sometimes left to fend for themselves. I suppose this could become a source of comfort for me one day, in the not-so-distant future, when I enter my so-called golden years.
In my experience, people in China tend to pay more attention to history, which has its good and not so good points. During the Qing Dynasty, roughly from 1600 to 1900, little mathematics was done in China because most scholars instead devoted themselves to the history of mathematics. Of course, there is great value in studying mathematical history, so that you can know what your predecessors (for me, geometers like Gauss and Riemann) did. I’ve found that perspective very helpful, whereas many Americans I know aren’t inclined to look back that much. After spending a long time working on a problem, they tend to be surprised when I tell them from where, and from whom, the original ideas came.
Another thing I appreciate about traditional Chinese philosophy is that we, as people, tend to see ourselves as being part of nature, which implies that it is not in our interest to try to conquer nature. Americans don’t always adhere to this view, and the intent in the U.S. often seems to be to analyze nature in order to control it. In these modern times, the Chinese don’t always adhere to this view either, though it is, at least, a long-held tenet within the culture. The best course, to me, seems to lie in a mixture of these two perspectives: We can try to understand nature, which is a valuable pursuit in its own right, while at the same time trying to go along with it—to coexist and be part of the “oneness” that’s sometimes referred to as the Tao.
I often wonder why China has not produced scientists of the same stature—and in the same numbers—as Western culture has turned out. I have been able to accomplish more than most Chinese mathematicians, perhaps because of the historical and philosophical grounding I got from my father, combined with spending more time in the United States, where some free-spirited American ways have, no doubt, rubbed off on me.
I have a lot of gratitude toward America, where I’ve been treated quite well for nearly half a century. The U.S. math world in particular has been very inviting. A lot of effort is put into nurturing young scholars, which is something I appreciate. Moreover, researchers from all over the world are made to feel welcome here. As a result, I have been exposed to a broad diversity of ideas that has in turn greatly contributed to my way of thinking about mathematics. I feel that I can be more outspoken in America, which is not always possible in China, where one has to watch one’s words more carefully. Students and colleagues have, for the most part, been extremely tolerant of my hard-to-understand accent. I also appreciate the fact that if you do well in your field in America, you can be reasonably confident of advancing, whereas in China, individual performance is not always enough to get you moving forward.
That said, I still feel very strongly about China. In particular, I am committed to changing the climate in which education and research are carried out there. Things have been improving on this front, especially in recent years, and I’m glad that I might have had a hand in that.
So where does this leave me? Despite my passion for China, and the deep-seated drive I feel to help further its progress, the fact remains that I spend most days of a typical year in the United States, to which I don’t have nearly as strong an emotional attachment. Yet that’s where my children were born and raised; that’s where our family home is; and that’s where my full-time job lies. Which leaves me, as I said, in the rather peculiar place of never feeling completely at home in either America or China. My true home seems to lie somewhere in between (perhaps somewhere around the International Date Line that zigzags through the middle of the Pacific Ocean). The one thing that has made it easiest for me to move, unencumbered, between these two countries and cultures—and, indeed, anywhere else in the world—has been mathematics itself, which has long served as my true passport.
I’ve had a long run in mathematics, it being almost fifty years since I arrived as a graduate student at Berkeley, but I’m not yet ready to hang up my straightedge and compass. There are quite a few problems that I’ve started and still intend to pursue, as well as others I haven’t gotten around to yet but am keeping on my “to do” list.
On the other hand, I don’t want to overstay my welcome, issuing proofs far into my dotage that are not up to standards and will only cause discomfort among my colleagues and friends. When I can no longer contribute through research, I intend to focus on teaching. Seventy students have earned their PhDs under my supervision so far, with several more in the pipeline. Hamilton once said that I’d built up “an assembly of talent . . . brought together to work on the hardest problems.” I hope he’s right, although I’m proud in any event, because what these folks have done so far, and will do into the future, surely eclipses anything that I could accomplish as an individual. Nevertheless, a time will come when I can no longer contribute through teaching either. At that point, I intend to step aside—and I hope to do so willingly—lest I become part of the old guard I’ve been fighting against for so long.
But I’ll always be thankful that, after much tumult in my early years, I was able to find my way to the field of mathematics, which still has the power to sweep me off my feet like a surging river. I’ve had the opportunity to travel upon this river—at times even clearing an obstruction or two from a small tributary so that the waters can flow to new places that had never been accessed before. I plan to continue my explorations a bit more and then, perhaps, do some observing—or cheerleading—from the riverbanks, a few steps removed.
It’s been an eventful journey so far—or at least eventful for me—though I hope others have found something of interest in this rambling account of a poor boy from Shantou who stumbled upon a quest for some deep truths of nature and has maybe been lucky enough to catch a few glimmers of insight along the way.