At present, Huawei has recruited four of the world's top mathematicians.
All four top mathematicians are Fields Medal winners. This nobel prize, known as the world of mathematics, has only 60 mathematicians in the world won the prize since its establishment. After joining Huawei, they will also continue to conduct basic mathematical research in their respective fields.
In fact, Huawei can develop so far, and has an indissoluble relationship with mathematicians. For the first time, Huawei's mathematicians in Russia broke through the 2G to 3G algorithm, so Huawei surpassed Ericsson's base station in one fell swoop and occupied the entire European market; the second time, Huawei's 5G technology also came from a Turkish mathematician, and now, Huawei's world leadership in 5G is obvious to all. The four new top mathematicians will help Huawei solve a series of software algorithms and other issues.
Huawei's emphasis on top talents has long been heard. Ren Zhengfei not only attracted "genius teenagers" with super high salaries, but even the Russian mathematical research center was specially set up for a Russian mathematician, who was later a Russian boy who made a key contribution to Huawei's 3G technology.
Ren Zhengfei knows very well that the key to research and development is talent, and it must be top talent. Where does top talent come from? In the past 13 years, Huawei has invested a total of 769.8 billion yuan in research and development, far higher than the level of its peers.
As a result, there are at least 700 mathematicians, more than 800 physicists, more than 120 chemists, 6,000 or 7,000 basic research experts, and more than 60,000 senior engineers and engineers in Huawei's team of scientists.
01
Four Fields Medal winners join Huawei
Huawei has recruited several of the world's top leaders.
Recently, Huawei France released for the first time a video of the appearance of French mathematician Laurent Lafog, announcing its joining Huawei.
Laurent Lafog said in the video that at a mathematical application conference four and a half years ago, He did not expect Huawei to be interested in its mathematical theory. It is invaluable that many people at Huawei think about problems based on a 10- or 20-year vision, and joining Huawei is a journey to explore a new world for themselves.
Coincidentally, Huawei's Lagrange Research Center in France also sent good news, and three top scientists, Alessio Figari, Maxime Concevich and Pierre-Louis Leon join Huawei.
What is "top-level"? After reading the resumes of the four people, it is clear at a glance.
First, all four of them share a common title — fields medal winner.
The Fields Medal is an international mathematical award established at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, and was first awarded in 1936. The prize is one of the highest international awards in the field of mathematics and is known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics". So far, only 60 mathematicians in the world have won the Fields Medal, including two Chinese mathematicians, which shows the weight of this award.
In 1994, Leon won the Fields Medal at the age of 22. She is a master mathematician in the field of partial differential equations, making revolutionary contributions to modern nonlinear partial differential equations, and her concept of "sticky solutions" has opened a whole new door to this field. She was also the first mathematician to give a solution and proof of Boltzmann's equation. Currently, he is Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Lagrange Centre For Mathematical Computing.
Concevich was a Russian mathematician who won the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work on "the zitification of shape variables that are valid for arbitrary Poisson manifolds, the modular space of a stable image in topological field theory, and the kink invariance of a complex integral construct similar to feynman's path integrals". In December 2021, he became an advisor to Huawei's Lagrange Research Center in Paris, France
Born in Rome, Figari won the Fields Medal in 2018 for his "contributions to optimal transport theory and its applications to partial differential equations, metric geometry, and probability theory." In July 2021, he joined the Lagrange Centre for research.
The latest appearance of Laforg is also not small.
Born in 1966, Lafog was a gifted mathematician. At the age of 18 he won a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and at the age of 35, Lafough won the 2002 Fields Medal for his outstanding contributions to logarithm and algebraic geometry. He is credited with cracking the most important conjecture about the nature of mathematics, making a great contribution to the largest single project in modern mathematical research, "Langlands". In addition, he is a mathematician and permanent professor at the University of Thackeray in Paris, a tenured professor at the French Institute of Higher Sciences, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
The research direction of these four mathematicians covers the basic mathematical fields of number theory, algebraic geometry, partial differential equations, and so on. Previously, Professor Yau Chengtong, the first Chinese Fields Medal winner, had questioned that "Huawei has no mathematicians", and this time, four Fields Medal winners were recruited at one time, which was the most powerful response.
02
Why mathematicians
"If a country wants to be strong, mathematics is the foundation", Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly said that he should attach importance to mathematics.
In fact, mathematics is the magic weapon for Huawei to achieve a number of technological breakthroughs and advance into no man's land.
For example, as early as 1999, Huawei had already opened a mathematical research institute in Russia. According to Ren Zhengfei, the study of all the Russian boys who played with the computer every day, no one knew what he was doing every day, even if he saw the leader, he simply said hello. And it is such a seemingly "ordinary" scientist who suddenly one day announced the completion of the core algorithm of 2G-3G mobile network switching. It is this algorithm that opens up the algorithm between different network standards, helping operators save more than 30% of costs, and the breakthrough of this technology also allows Huawei to quickly lead.
This is the well-known SingleRAN, that is, the integrated base station network construction concept and solution released by Huawei, which can effectively solve the problem of multi-standard network construction of operators and greatly reduce the investment problem of operator CAPEX.
Huawei's 5G technology also benefits from mathematical research.
In 2008, Turkish mathematician Eldar Arikan published a polarization code scheme that is mainly used for coding 5G communications, but this has not attracted the attention of the industry. In 2009, the research report attracted the attention of Huawei, and immediately invested a lot of money and talent in the project, and finally Huawei once again occupied the highlands and shined in the 5G era. Today, more than two-thirds of the polarization code patents belong to Huawei.
In addition, the camera function of the Huawei P30 mobile phone relies on mathematics to restore the weak signal; today's Huawei terminals change generations every three months, mainly the contributions of mathematicians...
As early as 2017, Lafog and Huawei conducted a two-year study of topology theory. After joining Huawei, Lafog will continue to study topological theory. This theory can serve as a theoretical basis for communications, computing, and artificial intelligence. Once the breakthrough, it will help Huawei bring new developments in communications, computing, artificial intelligence and other fields.
Some experts said that after Laurent Lafog joined Huawei this time, a series of problems such as software algorithms that Huawei faced before may be solved.
At Huawei Lagrange R&D Center, Concević participated in the research and guidance of higher-order category theory, deformation theory and other topics; Figari led a team of 5 people to work on the research topic of optimal transmission theory; and Leons focused on using mean field game theory for complex network planning to achieve computable finishing efficiency optimization.
Ren Zhengfei once said that the root of artificial intelligence is mathematics, and the two countries with the most developed mathematics in the world are France and Russia. As a result, Huawei has set up mathematical research centers in these two countries.
It is understood that Huawei has set up 26 R&D centers and 36 joint innovation centers in France, Germany, India, the United States and other countries around the world. Among them, in 1999, a special algorithm research institute was established in Russia, recruiting dozens of the world's top mathematicians; in France, Huawei opened two of the six R&D centers. In 2016, Huawei opened a mathematical research center in Boulogne, France, and recruited more than 80 researchers, all of whom have doctoral degrees or above, and are committed to basic algorithm research such as communication physical layer, network layer, distributed parallel computing, and data compression and storage. In 2020, Huawei established the Lagrange R&D Center in Paris, France, gathering more than 30 scientific researchers to engage in scientific research in the fields of mathematics and computing.
Ren Zhengfei also mentioned that more outstanding mathematicians will be recruited to join Huawei in the future.
03
Huawei's scientists will be more in the future
Ren Zhengfei once said that it is not enough to make chips and throw money, and companies need mathematicians and physicists.
As early as 2019, Ren Zhengfei revealed to the media that "Huawei has at least 700 mathematicians, more than 800 physicists, more than 120 chemists, 6,700 experts in basic research, and more than 60,000 senior engineers and engineers."
The reason why it can attract thousands of scientists to join is inseparable from Huawei's boldness in talent investment.
According to Huawei's official data, as of 2019, Huawei has a total of 194,000 employees worldwide, of which about 96,000 are R&D personnel, accounting for 45% of the total number of employees. With overseas employees from 157 countries and regions around the world, with a total of more than 37,000 employees, Huawei's annual R&D investment, including basic research, accounts for about 15% of sales. In 2008, Huawei invested 11.2 billion yuan in R&D, and by 2020, it invested 141.9 billion yuan in R&D. In the past 13 years, Huawei's cumulative R&D investment has reached 769.8 billion yuan.
Where have hundreds of billions of dollars been spent? It is understood that Huawei's R&D system consists of the 2012 laboratory, the Institute of Strategic Studies, and Huawei University.
Among them, the 2012 laboratory is Huawei's general research organization, which includes the Central Hardware Engineering Institute, HiSilicon Semiconductor, and Noah's Ark Laboratory. The main research directions of the 2012 laboratory are next-generation communications, cloud computing, audio and video analysis, data mining, machine learning, etc. The main direction is the development direction of the next 5-10 years.
Huawei Strategic Research Institute is responsible for cooperation with world-renowned universities and professional research institutions, and Huawei University is responsible for cultivating R&D talents and application-oriented talents.
In 2019, Huawei also proposed a "genius plan" to attract top talents with top salaries and top challenges, and has now recruited 17 people.
With the blessing of scientist Tiantuan, by the end of 2020, Huawei's effective patents have exceeded 100,000, and many achievements have been made such as super fast charging, da Vinci architecture NPU, 5G MEC, And Kirin chips.
In addition to recruiting talent around the world, Huawei has also invested in startups for scientists. In August 2021, Huawei invested in Qingdao Tianren Weina Technology Co., Ltd., a company behind which is the founder of a scientist. Before starting his business, Ji Ran, the founder of Tianren Weiner, was the chief scientist of a German listed company.
In fact, recruiting top talents is already the consensus of big manufacturers.
In 2018, Baidu Research Institute said it welcomed 9 world-class AI scientists.
In 2019, Daniel Poway was hired by Xiaomi Group. Po wei is a super genius in the field of artificial intelligence, graduated from Cambridge University, and has worked in IBM Research and Microsoft Research in the United States. He led the team to develop Kaldi, an open source tool for speech recognition, known as the father of Kaldi. Voice recognition software such as Apple Siri and Tmall Genie all originate from this tool.
However, although everyone is vigorously recruiting talents, Huawei's investment in talents is second to none. According to the data, in 2019, OPPO promised to invest 50 billion yuan in chip research and development and production in 3 years; in 2020, Xiaomi's research and development investment was 11.4 billion yuan, and Lenovo's research and development investment was 11.517 billion yuan, which is far from Huawei's 141.9 billion yuan.
Moreover, Huawei will continue to invest heavily in talents to attract scientific talents from all over the world. In 2021, Ren Zhengfei issued a speech entitled "Open Your Mind, Emancipate Your Mind, and Dare to Absorb the World's Best Talents", in which he mentioned, "Attract the world's best talents for my use, don't overemphasize professionalism, because the vast majority of people have good scientific literacy, as long as he is willing to change careers and is good enough, he can take the "scalpel" to participate in our "pig killing" battle, increase understanding of this thing, and it is possible to solve problems creatively."
Returning to the four mathematicians, Huawei's 3G and 5G technologies have benefited from the contributions of mathematicians. What will they bring to Huawei?