Find courage and learn from China’s football team loss, top mathematician tells colleagues
- Fields Medal recipient Yau Shing-Tung likens China’s 1-3 defeat to Vietnam to difficulties faced by his peers, urging them to be ‘unfazed by challenges’
- Yau encourages them to have purpose and aspirations and to ‘leave our traces in the history of mathematics’
The Sports account of state newspaper People’s Daily quickly expressed disappointment on Weibo.
“The national team has lost a match that shouldn’t and couldn’t be lost,” the post read. “We are anticipating a turning point for the team after they recognise the shame and grow more courageous.”
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Quoting Confucius – “learn from the virtuous; introspect and avoid having the flaws of those who are deficient” – he likened the national football team’s latest obstacle to the difficulties faced by his peers in academia.
“On the first day of the Year of the Tiger, the [Chinese] men’s football team suffered a defeat to the Vietnam team, leaving us in sorrow,” he said in the statement published on Thursday and widely circulated in academic circles.
“While [the defeat] was regretful, we should also look towards our own field.”
Yau, 72, received part of his education in Hong Kong and most at institutions in the United States. He is recognised as one of the most significant contributors to the areas of geometry and geometric analysis in modern times.
He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, an academic honour described as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. At the time of receiving the prize, Yau was an associate professor at Stanford University in the US and while he was stateless at the time, he said he considered himself Chinese. He obtained US citizenship eight years later. He is now based in Beijing.
In the short commentary, Yau said no domestically nurtured Chinese mathematician had yet won the Fields Medal but he acknowledged peers from Asia and the Middle East, including Japan’s Kunihiko Kodaira who was honoured in 1954, India’s Manjul Bhargava (2014) and Kurd Caucher Birkar (2018) who is now Yau’s colleague at Tsinghua University.
“I hope that as mathematicians, we understand the core value of the subject, are unfazed by challenges and do not only tackle small problems.”
“Articles published in first-class academic journals do not automatically have historical value,” Yau said.
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Yau urged his peers to have purpose and aspirations, and concluded with words of encouragement: “Let’s begin today and leave our traces in the history of mathematics!”
