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Ling Xin

Pioneering Chinese-American mathematician Zhongwei Shen has left the United States to take up a chair professorship at Westlake University in Hangzhou.
He joined Westlake’s School of Science in July to continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis – mathematical fields that form the backbone of modelling the natural world, according to the university website.
Shen, who was admitted to Peking University as a maths major at just 14, has spent 40 years in the US, including nearly three decades at the University of Kentucky, where he became a distinguished professor and served as chair of the mathematics department.
A founding member of the inaugural class of American Mathematical Society Fellows, Shen has also maintained close ties with China, including being named a Changjiang Scholar at Lanzhou University in 2015.
In an official announcement, Shen said he had long considered returning to China and closely followed developments back home. “I never considered going to another country,” he said. “If I were to leave, it’d have to be China, because that’s home.”
He said he was drawn to Westlake by its high-level, research-focused approach and the international character of its maths department. “I hope to help Westlake University become a top research university,” he added.

Shen’s research bridges advanced mathematics and physics, using equations to describe complex systems ranging from fluid flows to quantum particles. Much of his work focuses on problems in irregular or “rough” spaces where traditional methods fail, and he has developed tools that have improved understanding of how materials with complicated structures behave.
Born in Hengyang, Hunan province in 1964, Shen was raised mainly by his grandparents. His mother taught maths at a local primary school, while his father worked as a technician at the Northwest Nuclear Industrial Base – one of China’s earliest and largest nuclear hubs, located thousands of kilometres away in Xinjiang.
Shen started primary school at the age of five – so young that his mother seated him in the back row to avoid distracting older classmates. At nine, he and his mother moved to join his father at the nuclear base, where he stayed through high school.
In 1978, a year after China reinstated the national college entrance exam following the Cultural Revolution, Shen was admitted to the maths department at Peking University. He was only 14 and still in his first year of high school, inspired by a magazine profile of mathematician Chen Jingrun and his work on Goldbach’s conjecture.
During graduate studies at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shen met visiting professors from the University of Chicago and was drawn to their work, leading him to pursue a PhD there. After completing his doctorate, he did postdoctoral research at Princeton University under Elias M. Stein, one of the world’s leading figures in harmonic analysis.


Now at Westlake, Shen said he hoped to keep pushing forward the problems that had defined his career. “My work is still about solving one problem after another, advancing the field,” he said.
Collaboration, he added, was becoming central to mathematics, with each researcher bringing a different “toolbox” and perspective. At Westlake, he said he looked forward to exchanging ideas across disciplines.
Shen is also eager to return to the classroom. “I like teaching students, especially undergraduates,” he said. “They have enthusiasm and curiosity, and guiding them to see why a complicated formula must be true is one of the joys of teaching.”


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Shen will continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis at Westlake University in Hangzhou


Shen will continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis at Westlake University in Hangzhou.


After 40 years in US, pioneering mathematician Zhongwei Shen returns to China

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Shen will continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis at Westlake University in Hangzhou

Shen will continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis at Westlake University in Hangzhou