"Five years ago, I arrived in the United States by plane in China. At the moment I walked out of the terminal building of Dallas Airport, I quickly took out one of the five masks prepared in China and put it on, but when I took the first breath of air in the United States, I took it off. The air here is so fresh and sweet that it is particularly luxurious. "
People like this can be found everywhere in China. Every year, many foreign students go abroad to study in China, and some come back to contribute to the construction of the motherland. However, some people are attracted by foreign "free, democratic, fresh and sweet air" and throw themselves into the arms of foreign countries. There was once a high flyers from Peking University who would rather wash dishes abroad than return to China.
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High flyers of Peking University is Zhang, born in an intellectual family in Shanghai from 65438 to 0955. His father is a university professor majoring in electrical engineering, and his mother is a civil servant. Born in such a superior family, Zhang received a good education from an early age. Zhang has been interested in mathematics since he was a child. At the age of nine, he began to study Goldbach conjecture. At the age of fifteen, Zhang was sent to the farm with his mother. A few years later, he returned to Beijing as an ordinary worker.
1977, college entrance examination resumed. After several months of systematic review, Zhang took the college entrance examination with the score of 1978, and stood out from millions of people. He was admitted to Peking University, the top university in China, with excellent results, and entered the Department of Mathematics. 1982 obtained a bachelor's degree, studied under Professor Pan Chengbiao, and continued his studies in Peking University. 1985 successfully obtained his master's degree. Zhang went to the United States as a publicly funded international student on the recommendation of President Ding of Peking University, and studied at Purdue University in the United States. 1992 graduated from Mo Zongjian, an algebra expert in Taiwan Province Province, with a doctorate.
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Zhang should have a bright future after getting his doctorate, but before that, Zhang's doctoral thesis went wrong. When Zhang wrote his thesis, he quoted some theories of his tutor Mo Zongjian, but these theories were not confirmed, so after the paper was published, he found that his theory was wrong, so Zhang's thesis failed and his efforts for several years were in vain. It was not until Zhang was 37 that he got his doctorate.
Perhaps influenced by Zhang's paper, Mo Zongjian's new paper was rejected, which shows that there are irreconcilable contradictions between them. After Zhang graduated, the tutor didn't write a recommendation letter to Zhang.
Under the influence of Mo Zongjian, Zhang couldn't find a satisfactory job and was forced to make a living. Finally, he had to choose to wash dishes and do odd jobs in a restaurant. Ding, then the principal, admired him very much, knew Zhang's situation and invited him to teach at Peking University, but he would rather wash dishes in the United States than go back to teach at Peking University.
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In this way, after living in the United States for many years, 1999, Zhang met an alumnus and helped him solve the problem of network design. In order to thank Zhang for his help, his alumni found him a job as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. Zhang also taught at the school while conducting research on number theory. At the age of 58, he published Bounded Distance of Prime Numbers in Mathematical Yearbook, which made him enter the field of mathematics again. 20 14 won the Frank Nelson Cole Award in number theory, MacArthur Genius Award and so on because of many achievements in mathematics. But when Purdue University awarded Zhang an "outstanding alumnus", he said:
"I probably won't get this award. It can be said that Peking University is my only alma mater. "
20 16 became a tenured professor of mathematics at the university of California, Santa Barbara.
As for the reasons for Zhang's refusal to return to China, some people say that he "worships foreigners and flatters foreigners", while others say that he doesn't want to discredit his alma mater. He just wants to get up from where he fell. Later, Zhang said in an interview that he refused to return to China:
Because the motherland didn't have much material support at that time, there were very few mathematicians with the same academic background as him.