On the afternoon of Sept. 24, 2015, the 33rd SUSTC Lecture was conducted in the lecture hall of the first research building. Li Shangzhi, Professor of Beijing University of Aeronautics, brought the students and teachers of SUSTC a wonderful lecture titled “Math loves us”. Tang Tao, vice-president of SUSTC hosted the lecture.

Site of the lecture

    Professor Li Shangzhi is one of the 18 doctors after the Cultural Revolution and also is one of the first batch national teaching masters. He works on the study of algebra, especially on group theory, and also has outstanding achievements on teaching. He is the teacher that hosts most national excellent courses in Chinese colleges and universities.

Professor Li Shangzhi

    All seats are occupied for the lecture hall of more than 400 people; at the beginning of the lecture, professor Li Shangzhi introduced the theme of this lecture: illustrate that math loves us by using vivid facts. He cited various authorities, from the light of Buddha from Mount Emei to continuous function; from the harmony of musical scale to twelve-tone equal temperament and Pythagorean tuning, at last, he spoke of superposition of sine wave.

Professor Li Shangzhi also vividly introduced the course Calculus Enlightenment with colorful metaphor such as “walk with dainty steps”, “Give him an inch and he will take a yard”, “once and for all”, “do as someone else has done”; interesting poetries and visual examples make the cold mathematical questions simple and easy to approach.

Professor Li Shangzhi “Playing Rubik's cube”

    Professor Li Shangzhi played Rubik's cube at the lecture; he told us with his actions that math not only exists in figures, but also in Rubik's cube and even in everywhere of our life.

At the ending of the lecture, Professor Li Shangzhi proposed a question: study the boundary of light and shade on the wall from the aspect of math. Students were eager to say their opinions and expressed their different views. This math question in reality let them know that you will find many wonderful things that ignored by us if you look at the world with the view of math.

Professor Li Shangzhi signed and sent books to students

    In the interactive link of the lecture, students actively asked their questions and professor Li Shangzhi answered them carefully. After the completion of the lecture, some students still stayed at the lecture hall and asked for signature of Professor Li Shangzhi and took photos with him.