Month: September 2023

Just now, in China’s highest academic institution, another global math frenzy came to an end.
After five months of competition, the Alibaba Math Competition’s strongest four were named:

Their average age is 22. Among them is 17-year-old Chongqing child Qu Xiaoyu, who became the youngest ever gold medal winner and is already a sophomore in the math department at Peking University.
And Zhang Shengtong, a regular visitor to the Ars Electronica competition, finally won gold this year after taking part in the competition four times and winning silver four times. He solved a 70-year-old problem in math during his undergraduate years. His paper was published in the top journal Annals of Mathematics.
Li Xiaoyi and Hao Tianze are both studying at Peking University. One of them, Hao, dazzled a stand-up comedy show directly on the spot.
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In addition to the above four, there were 66 other contestants who won the Silver, Bronze and Excellence Awards out of 50,000 contestants.
At the awards ceremony, the representative of the winner of the Excellence Award, 20-year-old Lou Yingen with acromegaly, approached the stage.
He is currently studying physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the tutelage of Alan Guth, a renowned theoretical physicist and the creator of the burst model of cosmology. His love and optimism for math and even life sparked warm applause.
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The most intuitive feeling of this award ceremony is that more and more young mathematical youths are standing on the stage.
They undoubtedly represent the most promising emerging talents in the field of basic science in the world.
As a matter of fact, in the five consecutive years of Ali Math Contest, more than ten young mathematicians, including Wei Dongyi, have come out of the contest.

This math competition, which is open to all, is becoming a well-known stage for igniting the passion for math, displaying mathematical talent, and unearthing new stars in mathematics.
17-year-old Chongqing kid sets the youngest record
Let’s first take a look at the winners of the contest. There are 4 gold prizes, 6 silver prizes, 10 bronze prizes, and 50 excellence prizes.

Although Peking University occupies half of the country, the performance of other schools is also not bad. For example, Tsinghua, East China Normal and Xi’an Jiaotong University.
There were even winners from middle schools, such as Sun Qi Ao from Shanghai Middle School.
Let’s take a look at how strong these players are next.
Qu Xiaoyu: the youngest ever gold medalist
Qu Xiaoyu is a sophomore mathematics student at Peking University. This is Qu’s second time to participate in the Ali Math Contest. Last year, he won the Excellence Award for his first participation, and was the youngest winner of the competition ever.
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For Qu, the difference between the two competitions is “”I did eight hours last year and only five and a half hours this year, and this year I’ll be doing all of these topics.””
Last July, still a senior in high school, he represented the national team IMO won a full score of gold medals, and then guaranteed admission to the School of Mathematics of Peking University. Elementary school in the fifth or sixth grade began to read the mathematical analysis on their own, more than two years repeatedly read two or three times.
But even so, he himself confessed that “I am not a genius at all, I am very good at it. The more I learn math, the more I feel I don’t understand too much, I am very small.”
There was also a musical program at the awards ceremony.

Li Yiyi: Undergraduate to senior doctoral level
Also have IMO gold medal experience and 2002 born Li Yiyi, is currently at Peking University basic mathematics read Bo two.
His mentor is Liu Ruochuan, a member of the golden generation, whose research direction is P-advanced number theory, and who will soon enter Princeton University in late October to further his studies on exchange.

Last year, Li was selected for the second Peking University mathematics “Huaixin Bachelor” honorary title. At the time, the faculty said that his mastery of algebraic geometry at the undergraduate level had reached the level of senior doctoral students in algebraic geometry at top American universities.
As early as kindergarten he was able to find his own patterns in multiplying and dividing two- and three-digit numbers, and in junior high school he was delving into high school as well as college math, the report said. In life, Li is a simple man, and math is one of his biggest hobbies.
Hao Tianze: The Sober Segmentalist on Earth
Would you want to be a math expert like Zhang Yitang?
No, no, I would want to be the one who serves them tea and water.
Hao Tianze, who also won the gold medal, defines himself as a “normal type of player”, neither gifted nor hardworking. He is currently in the fifth year of his master’s degree program in basic mathematics at Peking University, with a focus on differential geometry.
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Looking back on his math journey, he admits: I am optimistic because I accept failure. The more you fail, the more optimistic you become.
My senior year of high school, I wanted to win the CMO Gold Medal, but I ended up winning the Silver Medal. Senior year wanted to make the IMO national team, but ended up not making it. I ran with the first two Ali Math competitions and finally took bronze in 21 years.
Math is a subject that requires accumulation and a lot of digging at the same time. At that time, we talked about love, talked about hard work, and to be able to maintain enough focus on the interest is a very advanced talent.
Participate in the competition in the past few years, his mindset is also quietly changing: mathematics research system is exceptionally large, he believes that it is not necessary to become the top of the person, as long as it can make a small contribution, I feel very satisfied.
Zhang Shengtong: undergraduate broken math 70 years of problems
Zhang Shengtong has been fighting for five years, and when he was 18 years old for the first time, he was going to the United States to study at MIT. As a result, in his freshman year, he joined forces with his team to solve a 70-year-old problem that had been plaguing the mathematical community, and it was published in one of the four major journals of the Mathematical Yearbook.
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Today, he has graduated from MIT and is pursuing a PhD at Stanford University. In an earlier public interview, he had threatened to win a Fields Medal for China. But today he laughs and waves his hand: the gap between his work and that of his award-winning predecessors is still too big.
In addition to these green faces, there is also a former god of learning who has returned.
Han Yanjun, the former Tsinghua god of learning, shocked the audience with “15 perfect scores in 20 courses, 4 99 points, a 98 points”. Even though he was guaranteed admission, he took the college entrance exam and became the top science student in Anhui that year (2011).
At that time, because he wanted to do research quietly, so he chose to take the initiative to disappear from the public eye. As a result, he won a silver medal in the Ars Electronica competition.
He is now an assistant professor at the Crown Institute of Mathematics, the Center for Data Science, and the Department of Computer Science at New York University.
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More than a dozen mathematicians have come out of Asai in five years.
It is worth mentioning that a special debate took place before the award ceremony.
Math enthusiasts from all directions, including courier boys, B station UP masters, and popular rising stars of mathematics, doctoral students of the Department of Mathematics of Peking University, and IMO Olympiad Gold Medalists explored in the Lecture Hall of the Department of Mathematics of Peking University:
Whether AI can replace mathematicians. This is really interesting at a time when big models are hot.
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The topic of ‘usefulness of math’ was also discussed again.
As a matter of fact, many advances in cutting-edge technologies, such as AI big models, computers, IoT, chips, quantum computing, drones, machine learning, etc., rely on mathematicians.
As one of the oldest subjects, math is the foundation of all disciplines. For example, one of the finalists in this competition is “the connection between a large language model and a formula in mathematics”.
Teachers in the group said that the question itself is not difficult, but they want to express that math is everywhere in life, and can help us understand some complex emerging things that are happening.
And the whole wave of technology, but also need more love of mathematics, with mathematical talent to participate in the talent.
Ali Math Contest, which has been held for many years without any threshold and is open to all people in the world, echoes this demand for talents.
In the past five years, it has also brought real impact:
For one thing, more people pay attention to math, so that math is no longer a carnival for the few. Since 2018 Ali Math Contest has cumulatively attracted 250,000 participants, with contestants covering more than 70 countries and regions.
This year, more than 70% of the participants are popular players, 37,000 people are not math-related majors, and the maximum age of the participants is 67 years old, and the minimum age is 7 years old.
For example, Sun Jinyuan, a 95-year-old courier boy who participated for the first time this time.
After finishing his work every day, he sets aside an hour or two to delve into math, and he once spent two weeks proving the Euler constant formula.
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Secondly, more young scientists are unearthed. In the five years since the Ali Math Contest was held, more than a dozen young scientists have come out of it.
For example, Su Weijie, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first silver medalist.
Now engaged in research at the intersection of mathematics and computing, he has won the Sloan Prize and the first SIAM Young Prize in Data Science, based on his significant contributions to optimization algorithms for machine learning, data privacy protection, the theoretical foundations of deep learning, and high-dimensional statistics.
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His work on convex optimization acceleration algorithms was featured in a large section of a 1-hour presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians by machine learning titan Michael Jordan.
Mingtao Xia, the 2021 Silver Medalist, graduated from Peking University and went to UCLA to pursue a PhD in applications, and is now an assistant professor at New York University.
Xia also has a hidden identity as an “uploader”. He does not have many followers on the B website, but he insists on sharing his thoughts on mathematical modeling and computation. In June this year, he graduated from UCLA with a PhD, and with the consent and support of his teachers, he live-streamed his PhD thesis defense on B-site:
“I hope that through online promotion and teaching, I can inspire more people’s passion and interest in math in a more popular language.”
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2020, 2021 Gold Medalist Born in 1994, Wang Donghao came to SUNY Stony Brook after graduating from MIT and is now an assistant professor at the Simons Center for Geometric Physics.
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Such competition awards that tap young scientists are actually not uncommon. For example, like the domestic Green and Orange Prize and the foreign Sloan Prize.
But a prize like this, which focuses only on mathematics and is open to all people and even to the world with zero threshold, seems to be the only one at present.
As Zhang Yitang said at the beginning of the competition, “I hope that through this global competition, we can awaken the public and society to pay attention to mathematics.”
Tian Gang, president of the Chinese Mathematical Society and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also said, “Mathematics knows no boundaries, and every year the Ali Math Contest attracts contestants from all over the world. This cross-cultural convergence and exchange not only enriches ideas and methods in the field of mathematics, but also promotes international exchange and cooperation.”
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With such a model, more people can embrace math and deepen their commitment to it, in order to truly promote the progress of science and technology from the field of basic science.
This requires a real sense of long-termism, and the five-year Ali Math Contest is just the beginning.
So ‘can AI replace mathematicians’? The answer to the thesis is obvious, AI needs more math workers, AI will help more math workers, and AI may also make more people become math workers.
Just like after AlphaGo, more people started to learn Go and enjoy it through AI guidance?

On the morning of July 18, 2019, 41-year-old Japanese citizen Shinji Aoba broke into Kyoto Animation Studio No. 1, dumped nearly 40 liters of gasoline on the first floor, and lit a fire while cursing.

The fire ultimately claimed the lives of 36 people, and 33 people, including the culprit Shinji Aoba, were injured to varying degrees. KyoAni Animation suffered a heavy and unmitigated disaster, with a large number of important drawings destroyed and many talented animators leaving this world forever.

The world hated such an evil act to the point of gnashing their teeth, but because of the severity of Shinji Aoba’s injuries, the trial surrounding the culprits was delayed again and again, and did not officially begin until September 5th of this year.

For four years, the medical staff tried their best to save Shinji Aoba’s life so that he could receive a fair trial and face his crimes head on. But to everyone’s dismay, all their efforts failed to produce a confession or apology from the murderer, and instead, they saw Shinji Aoba for what he really was – a demon in a state of delusion.

Shinji Aoba in the courtroom scene was numb, and when the prosecutor accused him of the crime, he did not deny it, but his attitude was glib and he tried to get off with incomprehensible delusional words.

Seeing such a record of the trial, those who still had a glimmer of hope for Shinji Aoba, their disappointment may be hard to express.

1

It took the Japanese government four years to save Shinji Aoba’s life in order for him to receive a fair trial. And this criminal’s severe burns became the most ironic aspect of this disaster.

Shinji Aoba’s attending doctor’s name was Keihiro Ueda, a specialist in emergency medicine. Soon after word of the Kyoani arson spread, Keihiro Ueda called various medical institutions to say that he and the hospital had experience in dealing with burns and could help admit the injured.

But instead of waiting for victims, he waited for the dying murderer.

Although Shinji Aoba would still scream at the top of his lungs when he first emerged from the scene, his life was soon hanging by a thread as more than 90 percent of his body was burned. The hospital judged his mortality rate to be 97.54%, making it almost a certain death. Seeing this unprecedented injury, many doctors said there was nothing they could do, but Keihiro Ueda did not give up.

After several surgeries, Ueda and his team first removed Aoba’s necrotic skin tissue and temporarily replaced it with artificial dermis, and then harvested normal skin from Aoba’s body, which was used to grow more transplantable epidermis.

Culturing the epidermis took three to four weeks, but dangers such as infection and unstable blood pressure put Shinji Aoba’s life in jeopardy, and it was questionable whether he would make it to that point.

In Keihiro Ueda’s diary, he was so preoccupied with the operation that at one point he was hallucinating: sometimes it was as if he could see the news of Aoba’s death on television or on the Internet. For this reason, Ueda frequently ran to and from Aoba’s hospital room, fearing that he would suddenly die.

In addition to the desperation of the medical staff, the diary records the only moment when Aoba reveals his humanity. After realizing that his voice could come out again, Aoba cried all day. When Ueda asks him why he cried, Aoba says it was for saving his life, and that the doctors and nurses in front of him had nothing to do with him, yet they still reached out with all their might.

The doctors’ efforts were not in vain. Aoba, who received an autodermal transplant, recovered quickly and was discharged from the hospital and sent back to the detention center. Keihiro Ueda saw Shinji Aoba for the last time in January of this year, when Aoba was nearly cured and basically able to take care of himself, which meant that the process of the trial could finally be put on track.

What people didn’t expect was that in order to save one villain, the doctors found a way to save many more. The use of cultured epidermis to heal such a large area of burns was unprecedented in the world, and this unexpected “clinical trial” was another step forward in the medical treatment of burns.

Keihiro Ueda has since cured other patients using this method.

However, from a more realistic point of view, this rescue came at a high price.

According to another dermatologist, it costs about 300,000 yen (about 15,000 yuan) to prepare just one piece of skin the size of a postcard. The number of pieces used to treat Shinji Aoba is likely to be 250 at most, so the cost is estimated to be close to 75 million yen. Together with the artificial dermis used in the previous emergency and the ICU hospitalization fee, the total cost was about 200 million yen (about 9.8 million yuan).

Naturally, Shinji Aoba was not able to pay it off; after all, he had already squandered his money – all of it on gasoline and tools for the arson in Kyoani. Three-quarters of this astronomical treatment cost is expected to be paid by the Japanese National Fund, while the remaining quarter falls to the Saitama Prefectural Government, where Aoba previously lived.

Such an arrangement is not destined to be understood by all. In the eyes of some Japanese netizens, the significance of doing one’s best for a demon destined for the death penalty is unclear. Even in the medical team in charge of Shinji Aoba, there were likewise a few doctors who were caught in hesitation. When they heard Shinji Aoba’s thanks, their hearts were instead mixed, as they did not know if this was in line with people’s expectations.

When people asked Ueda Keihiro what he thought, he both held fast to his principles as a medical doctor and looked forward to Aoba’s repentance.

“For the sake of those victims and their families, I cannot allow the murderer to escape the departed dead. This conviction is strong, so I must not let the culprit die like this.”

Shinji Aoba and Keihiro Ueda

But judging from the trial, the confession Keihiro Ueda wanted to see may not have been there.

2

Prior to the arson, Shinji Aoba had stomped around the Keiani studio several times. On the day of the incident, he purchased nearly 40 liters of gasoline from a gas station and had a special can with a wheelbarrow. He had no concept of what would happen if he poured that much gasoline on the ground and set it on fire. In his statement at the trial, he was slightly surprised by the number of deaths, but only felt that it was a bit “too much”.

“I didn’t think so many people would die, and now I feel I went a little too far.”

In a courtroom sketch, a wheelchair-bound Shinji Aoba wears a mask, but it’s hard to hide the grimace of his burned face.

At the time of the fire, eyewitnesses reported hearing a loud explosion in the studio, and some experts speculated that a “deflagration” had occurred at the scene. In a studio full of wooden utensils and paper, combustion produces large quantities of toxic gases and carbonized particles. But before people could escape, the heat ignited the toxic gases and oxygen, causing a huge explosion and shockwave.

Shinji Aoba was also not spared; he was burned beyond recognition and collapsed on the ground shortly after escaping the scene. He collapsed on the ground shortly after escaping the scene. Kind-hearted people around him thought he was a KyoAni employee and poured water on him to cool him down, and police officers arrived to ask about his injuries, but he kept shouting things like “KyoAni copied me”.

Shinji Aoba’s hatred for Kyoani was based on his belief that his work had been plagiarized by Kyoani. In court, he blandly confessed to the crime, but his subsequent confessions became increasingly baffling.

Since the age of 30, Shinji Aoba has had an unstable job and has lived a poor and muddled life. Then he was introduced to The Melancholy of Ryouga Haruhi, and Kyoani’s animation opened his eyes to another possibility.

From then on he started the path of writing. On a Japanese 2ch forum, he also thought he had connected with a female supervisor at Kyoani, and even developed a crush. Shinji Aoba has since submitted novels to Kyoani on two occasions, and when asked by his defense attorney why he chose Kyoani, Aoba’s response was conversely innocent.

“I believe that here I can create the best animation and write the best stories.”

But it was not to be, and after two unsuccessful submissions, Aoba’s world seemed to turn upside down. He began to believe that a dark force was playing with him, more specifically, a mastermind he called “Number Two”.

Shinji Aoba is not a first-time offender, having been imprisoned for robbing convenience stores and stealing women’s underwear before he turned 30. Shinji Aoba describes how he met “Number Two” while in prison, but this “Number Two”, whose face and information he cannot describe, became a nightmare that played with his life.

“Number Two had a wide range of connections, not only to the bigwigs in the ACG industry, but also to government officials. Aoba blames “Number Two” and “Female Supervisor” for his failure. He believed that “Number Two” had probably invested money in KyoAni, and had therefore taken control of KyoAni so that his work would not be selected, and that the other party was only interested in enjoying themselves by trashing their own hard-earned work.

The “female supervisor” who made Shinji Aoba fall in love with him has turned into a plagiarist. From “Kotone Girl” and “Blow Up! Euphonium” and “Free!”, Aoba thought that all of these works were plagiarized from his own novels.

In fact, the plagiarism claim doesn’t hold water in terms of time or content, but Aoba is still adamant about it.

“Plagiarizers are praised by the world, while those who work hard to create are left out in the cold. That ‘female supervisor’ is climbing higher and higher, while I’m slipping.”

In Shinji Aoba’s mind, he needs to do something “big” to get rid of the plagiarism that KyoAni Animation is doing to him.

In 2008, there was a terrible random murder in Akihabara, Japan. The culprit drove his car into a crowd of people and then attacked a fallen passerby with a dagger. ……

Influenced by this case and feeling that he was in a similar situation as the murderer, Aoba had wanted to repeat the tragedy of that year. He went to Omiya Station in Saitama Prefecture with six daggers, but stopped because he felt that the number of people in the neighborhood was too small to make it a “big deal” even if he did. In the end, his target became Kyoani, and even if he had to destroy an entire studio, he would send a warning to Kyoani.

“I think that’s all I can do.”

These delusional statements and jumps in logic became a breakthrough for the defense. Aoba’s defense attorneys argued for innocence or a reduced sentence by claiming that Aoba was in an unstable state of mind and had lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

According to the process, the analysis of Aoba’s mental state will become the focus of the debate later, but from the perspective of a layman, no one will believe in this kind of defense, and the crazy story from Aoba’s mouth.

In order to commit arson, Aoba meticulously prepared the tools to commit the murder; when purchasing gasoline, he used lies to escape suspicion; he chose to commit the murder at 10:30 a.m. because he judged that people were at work at that time and no one would come to stop him ……

He thought carefully at every moment of the murder, in other words, he knew exactly what he was doing.

3

Shinji Aoba’s trial drew attention from all walks of life, not only from the media who waited early, but also from the general public.

At the trial on September 5, the court provided 35 additional seats for spectators, which required people to qualify by drawing lots. The process of drawing lots was tedious, and one had to rush to the site in the heat to participate, but the site was still crowded with people early. Some of them wanted to understand the motives of the criminals, while others wanted to know why Shinji Aoba was here.

In order to recognize his character, the prosecutor listed the trajectory of Shinji Aoba’s life, in which many dark labels can be seen – the scars of his family of origin, the hardships of life, the loneliness of not being understood.

After his parents divorced at the age of nine, Aoba suffered from his father’s abuse until he passed away by suicide at the age of 20. After that, Aoba moved to her mother’s residence. But it didn’t last long, as his mother and stepfather miscommunicated with him and eventually kicked him out of the house. Since then, he has lived a life of poverty and emptiness.

Shinji Aoba at school

In the eyes of some old acquaintances, Shinji Aoba was more outgoing and conscientious when he was in school, but it’s a bit hard to believe that he’s become this way after dropping out of school. But in Shinji Aoba’s account, since he was kicked out by his mother and lived alone, his life has long been black and white, living in poverty and emptiness, and writing novels has become the only persistence. But who would have thought that this seemingly harmless hobby would become the beginning of a tragedy?

In the face of life’s misfortunes, Aoba chooses to blame it all on others, and even when he falls to the ground with serious injuries, he doesn’t forget to shout that everything is someone else’s fault.

“They plagiarized my work, call the president of KyoAni, I want to speak to the president!”

Shinji Aoba’s past is indeed laced with the bitterness of life, but that doesn’t excuse him from hurting others. For the wider public, what mattered most at the moment was nothing more than the outcome of the trial; after all, when he chose to take everything out on others, the pity people felt for him completely dissipated.

After four years of silence, people still had to wait another four months. There would be a total of 33 trials surrounding Shinji Aoba’s mental state and sentencing until January of the following year.

Only then would the case be legally closed – but the indelible pain of the victims would remain, and the disaster would never truly come to an end.