This is not a meme! Zhang Yitang, a mathematician who has recently shaken the mathematics world and went out of the circle, just wrote his own answer to the question about the Landau-Siegel zero point question on Zhihu:
In addition to explaining the theory, he also used the poems of his favorite poet Du Fu to express his feelings:
Yu Xin was the most bleak in his life, and his poems and prose in his later years moved Jiangguan.
The two lines of poems he recited were quickly forwarded, quoted, and pondered over. Everyone’s emotions about Zhang Yitang’s recent papers and his experiences seemed to be condensed in these lines.
It is not surprising that Zhang Yitang was originally a person who found happiness in mathematics and literature. When he went abroad, in addition to bringing a change of clothes, he only had a pair of chopsticks and a copy of “Guwen Guanzhi” in his luggage.
And there are indeed countless similarities between Zhang Yitang and the self-compared Yu Xin.
Yu Xin was the most bleak in his life, and his poetry moved Jiangguan in his later years
These two lines of poems are from one of Du Fu’s “Five Poems of Yonghuai Ancient Sites”, translated into vernacular as follows:
Yu Xin’s life was the most rough and sad, but his poems in his later years shocked Jiangguan.
Yu Xin was a writer during the Northern and Southern Dynasties.
Although not as famous as Du Fu, Du Fu highly praised Yu Xin’s poems and prose.
Even when he praised his “idol” Li Bai, he also said that Li Bai’s poems “fresh Yu Kaifu” have the freshness of Yu Xin’s poems.
But why did Zhang Yitang compare himself with Yu Xin?
Probably because their life paths are equally high and also “bumpy”.
Because of his family background, Yu Xin was an accompanist to the prince of the Liang Dynasty when he was a teenager, and his starting point was much higher than that of ordinary scholars.
Later, with the mission of the imperial court in hand, Yu Xin went to the country and left his hometown to be an envoy to the Western Wei Dynasty.
As a result, the Liang Dynasty fell, and Yu Xin was imprisoned and displaced. He was detained successively by the Western Wei Dynasty and the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and never returned to his homeland.
Speaking of Zhang Yitang, his starting line is quite dazzling.
He was born in an intellectual family, and his father was a university professor. He himself took the college entrance examination at the age of 23 and was successfully admitted to the Department of Mathematics of Peking University.
From 1978 to 1985, Zhang Yitang received his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Peking University School of Mathematics, and studied under the famous Chinese mathematician Professor Pan Chengbiao during his master’s period.
Because of his outstanding performance, under the recommendation of his mentors, Zhang Yitang was awarded a government-sponsored study abroad quota. In 1985, he went to Purdue University in the United States to study for a doctorate.
He went to the United States to study for a Ph. D., and his mentor was Mo Zongjian, an algebraic geometer.
Here is the problem. Zhang Yitang himself does not like algebraic geometry very much, but is more interested in number theory.
Students who like number theory follow algebraic geometers to study for a Ph. D. If there is no accident, there will be an accident:
Zhang Yitang doesn’t seem to care too much about how to get a doctoral degree, he is obsessed with mathematics research, and hopes to return to the direction of number theory after graduation.
And, when he submitted his doctoral dissertation, he had been studying at Purdue University for 6 and a half years. In the past six and a half years, he has published very few academic papers.
Not only that, because of events such as the “Jacobi Conjecture” and the doctoral dissertation being considered to have “errors”, conflicts broke out between him and his supervisor, and the teacher-student relationship became subtle and rigid, and gradually became turbulent, and even broke up directly (of course , it will be many years later).
Anyway, the end result was that Zhang Yitang didn’t get a letter of recommendation from his tutor when he graduated.
There is no recommendation from a tutor, few papers, and an introverted personality. For various reasons, American universities and research institutes rejected him.
With no job and a difficult life, he sometimes can only borrow in the basement of a friend’s house to make a living.
He didn’t give up, and went to change his career to engage in finance or computers. He just continued to study number theory and tried his best to make a living.
For a long time, Zhang Yitang didn’t have any good jobs, and when he was at his worst, he was washing dishes in a restaurant.
I also worked as an accountant at a Subway restaurant opened by a Peking University alumnus. I used my memory and calculation skills to play, and I took time to study mathematics at night.
Zhang Yitang, who is working hard, is over half a century old, but he still “does nothing”.
It can be said that it is not bleak.
Until 2013, Zhang Yitang became famous overnight with his article Bounded Distances Between Prime Numbers, setting a record for the fastest review in the top mathematics journal “Mathematics Annals” in a century.
Specifically, he made a breakthrough in the study of twin primes without relying on unproved inferences:
It is found that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers whose difference is less than 70 million.
Once Famous World Knows, happened in the second half of Zhang Yitang’s life.
This year, he was 58 years old.
Yu Xin’s most acclaimed “History of Fu”, “Fu of Ai Jiangnan” and “Twenty-Seven Poems of Miyonghuai” were also born in his later years, so Du Fu praised “Yu Xin’s writing is more mature than old”.
This year, the 67-year-old Zhang Yitang once again “moved the river pass” in his twilight years, and produced achievements that attracted worldwide attention:
Published a paper claiming to have essentially proved the Landau-Siegel zero-point conjecture.
This conjecture is the bottleneck of many number theory problems. “It’s a bit like the Riemann conjecture. Once it is solved, a hundred conjectures become theorems.”
At the same time, Zhang Yitang’s thesis also proposed “an important new idea of screening method”.
The results of this paper are awaiting peer review.
Mathematician Hardy once said that “mathematics is a young man’s game”.
In this regard, Zhang Yitang, who is over sixty years old, said, “I have never thought of giving up on the Landau-Siegel zero-point conjecture.
I didn’t pay much attention to his things, I felt as if it had nothing to do with me directly, I was not affected by those things.
Because of the twin prime numbers and the zero-point conjecture, some people say that Zhang Yitang was “struck twice by lightning”.
Many people in the outside world expressed regret, because the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics, is only awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40.
However, Zhang Yitang mentioned in his latest answer that he has no regrets about whether he won the award or not. He “did not take this thing too seriously.”
However, he was full of grandchildren, and he still wrote on Zhihu with pride and hope: I have a little granddaughter who likes mathematics very much and has entered the mathematics genius class.
She is very talented and said, Grandpa, I want to fulfill your wish and win the Fields Medal for you.
Teachers and students who do not communicate
Zhang Yitang’s “moving Jiangguan” is already a firm fact.
However, his “bleak life” actually has other perspectives.
As mentioned above, Zhang Yitang’s ups and downs can be said to have originated from his study experience at Purdue University. So his mentor Mo Zongjian at the time became an important part of this experience that cannot be avoided.
After Zhang Yitang became famous, he mentioned his relationship with his mentor in an interview:
When he graduated with a Ph.D., Mo Zongjian’s attitude was not “very good”, and he would often say “no Chinese student is good”. Later Mo Zongjian did not help him in seeking a teaching position.
In 2013, when Zhang Yitang broke through the twin prime number conjecture, Mo Zongjian also wrote an article from another perspective, recalling Zhang Yitang’s life in Purdue. Mo Zongjian also updated this article in 2018.
In the 2018 version, there seems to be a lack of trust between the teacher and the student from the beginning.
Mo Zongjian mentioned that it was Ding Shisun, then president of Peking University, who recommended Zhang Yitang to him. Later, Zhang Yitang didn’t explain this clearly, so he thought Zhang Yitang was Ding Shisun’s student.
It wasn’t until he communicated with Zhao Chunlai, another Peking University professor, that Zhang Yitang was actually a student of Pan Chengbiao.
I sometimes wonder why Yitang didn’t tell me the truth.
As for the breakdown of the teacher-student relationship caused by the rumored doctoral dissertation, Mo Zongjian said:
Zhang Yitang has been telling me in private that he hopes to solve the Jacobi conjecture together with me. I always tell him that I never write a doctoral dissertation with my students. This is obvious, just look at my doctoral record. All discussions between me and my students belong to my students.
Of course, I understand why some tutors want to work with their students. Because sometimes, supervisors have to write doctoral dissertations for students. On the other hand, in the case of teacher-student cooperation, students may be treated unfairly.
After a period of time, as Zhang Yitang himself said, Mo Zongjian did not really support him to continue working on the Jacobian conjecture, but wanted to take him to work on issues related to the singularity resolution theorem.
But Zhang Yitang still persisted.
Yitang spends his free time thinking about mathematics. A few years later, Yitang thought he might have found a way to solve the Jacobian conjecture without relying on my thesis.
He told a lot of people that he solved the Jacobi conjecture, but never said a word to me.
In addition, Mo Zongjian denied the statement that “Zhang Yitang’s doctoral dissertation failed because Mo Zongjian’s dissertation on the Jacobian conjecture had errors”.
He thinks his article is correct. On the one hand, in 1984, two experts and scholars confirmed the accuracy of the paper after a semester of research. On the other hand, after Mo Zongjian, some mathematicians obtained the same result as Mo Zongjian with a completely different method.
But no matter what, the teacher-student pair cut off contact after Zhang Yitang graduated.
Mo Zongjian confirmed in the article that when Zhang Yitang’s father passed away, someone asked him for Zhang Yitang’s contact information in order to get in touch with him and inform him of the news. But Mo Zongjian didn’t know Zhang Yitang’s address either, because “an adult has the right to keep his own address secret”.
Mo Zongjian later conveyed the news to other Chinese students, “A few days later, Yitang found out about it.”
One More Thing
Finally, let’s go back to the poem “Yu Xin was the bleakest in his life, and his poems moved Jiangguan in his later years”.
In this personal answer, Zhang Yitang also mentioned that he likes Chinese classical poetry very much, and the poet he admires most is Du Fu.
Previously, Zhang Yitang also showed his familiarity with Du’s poems in an online communication activity with alumni of Peking University in New York.
What’s interesting is that at that event, Zhang Yitang also complained about what the outside world called his favorite thing about “poems moving Jiangguan in old age”:
How did I quote this poem? Still when I first visited Princeton 9 years ago.
(asked) Can you use two ancient Chinese poems to describe the current state, I immediately thought of this, but I didn’t prepare in advance.
It is nonsense to take this poem out and say that it is Zhang Yitang’s favorite Du poem. In fact, among Du Fu’s five poems chanting ancient relics, this one is not my favorite either.
My favorite should be the third song, “The mountains and all evils go to Jingmen, and the concubine grows up and there is still a village”.
Sometimes you can’t laugh or cry when you become famous.
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