Recently, SUSTech Vice President Tang Tao was invited to speak at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The congress began on August 1st and will end on the 9th. 180 outstanding mathematicians from 19 academic fields were invited to the event, including five mathematicians from Chinese mainland: Tang Tao, Xu Chenyang and Zhang Pingwen from Peking University, You Jiangong from Nankai University, and Chen Meng from Fudan University (who co-presented a 45-minute report with Chen Jung-Kai from National Taiwan University).

Many Chinese mathematicians have been invited to speak at ICM in the past, including Hua Luogeng, Wu Wenjun, Chen Jingrun, Feng Kang and Zhang Gongqing. 2002 saw China host the ICM in Beijing.

About ICM:

        ICM is the world’s largest mathematics conference that meets once every four years. Hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, and the Chern Medal are all awarded during the congress's opening ceremony. Each congress is memorialized by a printed set of proceedings recording academic papers based on invited talks intended to be relevant to current topics of general interest. The first ICM was held in Zürich, Switzerland in 1897 and the 2002 ICM was held in Beijing, China. Over the past century, it was only interrupted during the two World Wars. Being invited to talk at the ICM has been called "the equivalent [...] of an induction to a hall of fame."

About Tang Tao:

        Professor Tang Tao received his BSc in Mathematics from Peking University in 1984 and obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Leeds University in 1989. From 1990 to 1998, he was a faculty member of Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University and was granted tenure in 1996. He joined Hong Kong Baptist University in 1998, and was promoted to Chair Professor in 2003. He was awarded the Leslie Fox Prize for numerical analysis in 1988 and the Feng Kang Prize for scientific computing in 2003. In 2012, he was elected as a SIAM Fellow for his “contributions to computational fluid dynamics and in particular, development of adaptive algorithms”. While at Hong Kong Baptist University, Tang was the Head of the Department of Mathematics , the Director of Graduate School, Associate Vice-President, and Dean of Science. In May 2015, he was appointed Vice President for Research by SUSTech in May 2015.

Original Article: Cheng Wenjing

Translation & Adaptation: Fan Yining

Proofreading: Chris Edwards