Source: Home of Tech Workers
Wu Wenjun (1919.5-2017.5), mathematician, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, winner of the highest national science and technology award, and winner of the national honorary title of "People's Scientist".
Just after his founding year, he became famous for publishing the "Wu formula" and became a rising star in the topological world; at the age of 37, he won the highest prize of the first natural science prize; he never won the Fields Medal known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics", but his academic achievements were cited by 5 "Fields Medal" winners; he opened a new path for the study of the history of mathematics.
He is Wu Wenjun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a famous mathematician, the winner of the national honorary title of "People's Scientist", and the winner of the 2000 National Supreme Science and Technology Award.
Wu Wenjun
Adhering to a heart of truth-seeking exploration, Wu Wenjun "drilled" into many fields of mathematics, not only exploring the depth of mathematics, but also revealing the breadth of mathematics, and made outstanding achievements in topology, mathematical mechanization, and the history of Chinese mathematics.
And the year of the establishment of the topological "earthquake"
"Yo-yo Wu class, Holy Hand Tailoring Skills." Several altars are not written in the world, and the name of the handsome Qing Shi remains. This is a poem written by Fang Fuquan, vice president of Capital Normal University and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to commemorate Wu Wenjun's achievements in the field of topology.
After Wu Wenjun's teacher Chen Shengshen brought him into the field of topology, it became one of the most important research areas of his life.
In 1947, Wu Wenjun went to the University of Strasbourg in France to study, and two years later received his doctorate, and then worked as a researcher at the French National Science Center. At that time, when the Topology revival of France was in full swing, Wu Wenjun grew rapidly in such a good environment and engaged in the study of indicative class theory.
In 1950, as soon as the "Wu Formula" was published, it quickly attracted widespread attention in related fields, becoming one of the major breakthroughs in topology at that time, and Wu Wenjun was regarded as a rising star in the topological community. His achievements in topology with Thom, Searle, and Paulaire are known as "topological earthquakes", making topology one of the mainstream disciplines of mathematics in the 20th century. His pioneering achievements have also been cited by five Fields Medal winners.
After the rise of fame, foreign universities and research institutes extended an olive branch to Wu Wenjun, but he refused one by one and returned to the motherland in 1951.
A French friend once said to Wu Wenjun: "If you go a few months late, maybe the Fields Medal in 1954 will be given to you." When asked later, he just laughed and said, "I don't care." ”
Innovation is not stopped, creating mathematical mechanization
In Wu Wenjun's view, to engage in mathematics, we should have our own things, take our own path, can not do what foreigners do, should let foreigners run after us, this can be done.
It is this spirit of innovation that drives him to create an internationally renowned mathematical mechanization method with Unique Chinese Characteristics in the "Sound of Controversy".
In the 1970s, Wu Wenjun, who worked in a computer factory, felt the great power of computers and was keenly aware that computers as a new tool would inevitably be involved in mathematical research on a large scale.
Wu Wenjun, who was nearly a year old at the time, decided to learn computer language. "He stayed in the computer room for more than a dozen hours a day, and for several years, his time on the plane has been the highest in the world." Gao Xiaoshan, who is now executive vice president of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recalled.
By then, Wu had opened up a new field of mathematical mechanization, and his goal was ambitious: to enable computers to mechanize mathematics, which is typical of mental labor. That is, let the computer prove the mathematical theorems. Programming in the computer room is precisely to verify his ideas.
Wu Wenjun is reading.
During the Spring Festival in 1977, Wu Wenjun successfully verified the feasibility of his machine proof geometric theorem method for the first time by hand arithmetic. Soon, his paper "Elementary Geometric Determination Problems and Mechanization Proofs" was published in Science in China, which was his opening work in the field of mathematical mechanization, and clarified in the notes that the idea of mechanization originated from the creation of Chinese mathematicians in the Song and Yuan dynasties.
In 1984, Wu Wenjun published his most important achievement in the field of mathematical mechanization, "Basic Principles of Machine Proof of Geometric Theorems", in the journal "Systems Science and Mathematics" sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In this series of studies in Wu Wenjun's later years, Wu Wenjun proposed the "Wu method" for the machine proof of geometric theorems, the mechanization proof method for the theorem of differential geometry, the "Wu elimination method" for symbolic solution of equation systems, and the finite kernel theorem for global optimization, and established a mathematical mechanization system.
Mathematical mechanization theory is considered to be a pioneering work in the field of automatic reasoning, and has been applied to many high-tech fields, solving core problems in high-tech fields such as surface splicing, mechanism design, computer vision, and robotics.
In 1986, artificial intelligence, the most authoritative magazine in the field of international artificial intelligence, published a 300-page "Wu Method" paper album, which was full of the application of "Wu Method" in various fields of artificial intelligence.
In 2009, at the age of 90, Wu Wenjun began working on the world-class puzzle "big integer decomposition"— the mathematical foundation of the most widely used cryptographic security today.
The career created by Wu Wenjun shines in the sky like the "Wu Wenjun Star", illuminating the way forward in today's mathematics. In 2017, the Chinese Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announced the establishment of the "Wu Wenjun Applied Mathematics Award" to promote the development of mathematics and other disciplines. (Text: Old Scientist Academic Growth Data Collection Project Office / Innovation Strategy Research Institute of China Association for Science and Technology)