What’s new: Caucher Birkar, a world-renowned mathematician who won the Fields Medal, joined China’s Tsinghua University as the latest top scholar invited by Chinese universities.
A ceremony for the conferment of professorship was held in Friday Beijing. Birkar will teach at Tsinghua’s Qiuzhen College, an institution formed in March to cultivate mathematics talent.
Birkar is the second Fields Medal winner to join Tsinghua, following Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese American mathematician. The Fields Medal is known as the Nobel Prize in mathematics as the top award in the field.
The background: Caucher Birkar is a U.K.-based Iranian Kurdish mathematician. He won the Fields Medal for his contributions to algebraic geometry in 2018.
Born in 1978, Birkar was educated at the University of Tehran and the University of Nottingham. He is a professor at the University of Cambridge.
Before receiving the professorship from Tsinghua, Birkar visited the university in 2017 and 2019.
Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com)
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