Selective hearing of speech on applied mathematics

After two rounds of selection by two committees consisting of over 160 and 30 distinguished global scholars each, the first session of the International Congress of Basic Science held in Beijing last July selected 85 most important mathematical essays in the past five years. Only six of those essays were authored or co-authored by domestic professors.

In comparison, the number of professors authoring or co-authoring the award-winning essays from the United States exceeds 70. From the procedure followed there is no reason to suspect any "bias" against Chinese professors; all the related discussions and academic meetings were conducted by Chinese professors, with open, free, unguided discussions.

That's a key part of the controversy-stirring speech Shing-tung Yau, a world-renowned mathematician and professor at Tsinghua 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 that said "China's mathematical research level today has not even caught up with the US 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 "1940" and slammed him for it.

Public opinion today can easily be manipulated using short video clips, in which a whole 10,000-word essay gets reduced to three sentences. That is why 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, but those points seem to have missed the ears of the audience.

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, a Chinese Academy of Science academician 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 polar coding research basis of professor Erdal Arikan in Turkiye.

China's contribution in the field of applied mathematics should never be underestimated, but the field of public opinion needs more tolerance to accept different viewpoints. At least give people a chance to finish saying what they want to say.