The statements in this article are based on reliable sources and are repeated at the end of this article
When we mention the great mathematicians of modern China, everyone will definitely think that this description is likely to refer to Chen Jingrun. Or another Hua Luogeng, these great mathematicians can be said to be familiar to our cognition. But what we want to talk about today is not actually him, but another mathematician who has a huge reputation in the world, but when he was alive, he was considered a "weirdo" and a "civil science" almost all his life - Lu Jiaxi. [Beer]
1
Those buried "talents".
People's Daily, May 21, 1985, 8th Edition, "Respect for Local Talents"
If those brilliant and well-known great scientists are the "geniuses" in everyone's cognition, then these have been buried for almost a lifetime for various reasons, and they know that before they die or even many years after their deaths, they were discovered by later generations from the pile of old papers and their contributions, which can be said to be "geniuses", just like treasures buried deep in the ground, after the precipitation of time, but it is a pity that the pearl is dusty after all.
He did not come from a "scientific research family", his parents were not university scholars, and he had never studied abroad. In 1935, he was born into a poor merchant family, but Shanghai was a wealthy place in China at that time, and thanks to his father's hard work, he still received a certain amount of primary education. However, the good times did not last long, as his father died of illness, he had to leave school at a young age and began to work various jobs to support the family's life.
If history hadn't changed, he would most likely have become a "street slicker" in Shanghai, and then start supporting his family. But with the establishment of New China, his life finally changed, and although no one ever found out, his strong talent for learning was there after all. His turning point was that he heard that the Northeast was going to recruit a group of trainees at that time, give them targeted training in statistical ability, and then go to serve industrial production, so he immediately signed up for the training course.
It was also in this process that he began to discover a lot of knowledge that he didn't know before, learned a lot of mathematical knowledge, and discovered that his biggest hobby was numerical mathematics. At the end of the training course, Lu Jiaxi graduated with the best grades in the same period and entered a large factory in Northeast China at that time to engage in related work.
You may not know it, but you must know that this can be a very decent job at that time, and the most important thing is that because of his very strong ability, he can often complete the task at hand quickly, and in his spare time, he will learn all kinds of knowledge by himself to enrich himself. Due to the lack of many Chinese literature materials in China at that time, he specially taught himself a number of foreign languages and was able to read English and Russian fluently.
It was in this situation that he was exposed to many mathematical conjectures and puzzles of the time through reading materials, and he was fascinated by the hypotheses and problems put forward by his predecessors. But when he really began to "tackle" these problems, he soon discovered his shortcomings. For example, there was a very famous "Cockman problem" at that time, although he put a lot of effort into research, but he never knew how to start.
This is because, after all, he has not been exposed to formal and systematic training in modern knowledge systems, and lacks many key abilities. This made him want to go to university to further his education. Many of the workers in the same period did not understand his ideas very well, after all, their positions could be said to be the best batch in China at that time, and the strange theoretical formulas he often put forward made many workers think that he was a strange person.
His thirst for knowledge, combined with a lack of common ground with the people around him, made him realize it was time for him to leave. After leaving a stable and lucrative job, he relied on his own self-study and was admitted to a local university, where he studied for four years and completed his last shortcoming after systematic scientific research training. After leaving school, he was assigned to teach physics at a local school in Inner Mongolia.
2
The "legendary" path of scientific research
It was also here that he began a series of "super-god" roads, taking classes during the day and taking time out of his free time to study such harsh conditions, overcoming a large number of conjecture and hypothesis problems related to combinatorial theory along the way, and proposing many shocking theories that can be said to "change the academic world". But it was here that his efforts never received the response they deserved, and in the end he almost "burned" himself clean.
Here is a general introduction to this so-called combinatorial theory, which deals with the problem of counting in discrete structures, the construction of structures, and the properties between them. Its core content includes permutation, combination, binomial theorem, recursive relations, graph theory, and combinatorial optimization. In short, combinatorics theory offers a range of tools and techniques for solving a variety of counting, constructing, and optimization problems, and it has important applications in many other areas of mathematics, as well as in computer science, engineering, and social science.
There is naturally no shortage of researchers in the world for such an important theory, and many mathematicians have dug deep into this theory, which can be said to be an important research direction at the international frontier at that time. And as early as 1961, when he officially finished his university education, he studied the puzzle that bothered him that year. He even made a detailed summary and submitted a thick paper to the Institute of Mathematics.
However, even in the most cutting-edge mathematics community at that time, there was no detailed solution to this theory, and even the research institute at that time could not give him an accurate judgment and answer, but in order not to "disappoint" this hard-working young man. At that time, the experts of the institute also specially selected a number of research papers in related fields from the world to recommend to him, and after receiving the reply, he also thought that he had a gap, and quickly borrowed a large number of literature.
To know how there could be literature in such a professional field in the small city at that time, he could only take advantage of the holiday to take the cheapest train to Beijing. Then I stayed in the big library for a long time, and because of lack of money, I often had to sleep in the corner of the train station. But relying on such conditions, he revised his theory, and he was full of confidence and sent it to many mathematical journals, but he did not expect that what was waiting for him was not fame, but a long road to rejection.
This "retreat" is nearly 20 years, although he has never stopped researching these years, but he has never succeeded in publishing any results in China, and the manuscripts he sends often only get a result that is "unverifiable" or "no publication value". It wasn't until eighteen years later that he saw in an American magazine that a foreign mathematician had solved his 1961 results in 1971.
He was ahead for ten years, but the times took him eighteen years. However, the past 18 years have also allowed him to complete another world-class great achievement, overcoming the "solution to the existential problem of large sets", which was the most difficult and cutting-edge problem in the world at that time, but this major research that was enough to lay the foundation of a "great mathematician" was not even published in China at first, but was published in the foreign "Journal of Combinatorics Theory", which shocked the world mathematics community at that time as soon as it was launched.
When this achievement spread to China, domestic experts and scholars from all walks of life presented an embarrassing situation of "who is Lu Jiaxi", until everyone roughly understood what kind of person he was, and various praises and seminars followed. However, it is a pity that his body has been completely overdrawn because of the life of high-intensity teaching and research for many years, and after being invited to his first mathematics exchange meeting in 1983, he died of a heart attack on the day he returned home, and won the first prize of the National Natural Science Award four years later.
3
The "Progressiveness" and "Lag" of Science
The year 1884 was marked by a number of important events, most notably the European powers meeting in Berlin to establish a general policy for the partition of Africa. But few people know that on January 6 of that year, a priest died in the European city of Brno, along with the results of his life's work. Thousands of local mourners went to see him off, and in their hearts the priest was a noble man, an exemplary priest.
But in such a huge crowd, no one knows the true place of this deceased old man in the history of human science. The article reporting his death best commented on him in science only to say that he was a "passionate friend of the natural sciences", the deceased who was known only as a priest at that time, the founder of the famous biological genetics, the great scientist Mendel.
He was born in a rural village and was supposed to spend his life in that land, but during the most turbulent years in Europe, his father traveled many parts of Europe and saw different customs and customs. Because of this, he attached great importance to the education of his children, and his mother was an enlightened person, and the two finally decided to let him go to secondary school.
It was such a small decision that made the era lose a farmer but usher in a great scientist. At that time, being able to enter secondary school had a huge impact on a person. Because here it is no longer just about learning basic subjects, but entering a threshold that broadens one's horizons. It was here that he wrote, "If I had a soul in the next life, I would be glad to see my invention carried forward in future generations".
Later, I believe that everyone will not feel unfamiliar, he carried out the famous plant hybridization experiment, thus truly uncovering the genetic principle of one of the "fundamental origins" of human beings. However, due to the social environment at the time, this valuable research could only be buried with him, and it was not until many years later that it was reproduced by later scholars. It has played a significant role in the later biological sciences and modern genetics.
Resources:
The Paper - Achievements on par with Darwin, but buried for more than 30 years, how talented is this neglected science giant?
Douyin Encyclopedia - Lu Jiaxi
China Broadcasting Network - Lu Jiaxi Conquers Mathematical Problems "Steiner Series"