Professor Tang Tao, Vice-President of SUSTech, has been appointed as the 2017 new member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on November 28, 2017. It is the first time that a Shenzhen-based member is admitted to the organization, the linchpin of China’s drive to explore and harness high technology and the natural sciences for the benefit of China and the world.

The academy unveiled the list which of new appointees which included 61 members in total, including 11 mathematicians and physicians, 9 chemists, 13 life and medical science experts, 10 geoscience experts, 6 information technology experts and 12 in science and technology.

Becoming a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the highest academic title in the People's Republic of China for science and technology scholars and is a lifelong honor. With the election of Professor Tang Tao to the academy's Department of Mathematical Physics, the number of Academicians at SUSTech reaches 19, including 8 full-time academicians.

In May 2015, Professor Tang Tao was appointed Vice-President of SUSTech as well as professor in the Department of Mathematics. He started teaching advanced mathematics classes to SUSTech students right away, and said at the time “This is the first time that I am working at this level in a mainland university, and I am looking forward to it”. Two years along and Professor Tang has also become a mentoring tutor in the residential colleges, providing valuable guidance and advice to his students. He is also credited for having developed multiple undergraduate courses as well as given countless lectures on campus.

Since his first days at SUSTech, he has devoted himself to building a world-class university, and has made valuable contributions in promoting innovation in science and technology, as well as in developing the university in the curriculums as well as in the administration fields.

On January 9, 2017, at the National Science and Technology Awards 2016, the project "Self-adaptive and High-precision Numerical Method and Its Theoretical Analysis" under the chairmanship of Professor Tang Tao won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award. It was also the first winner of the National Natural Science Award from Southern Polytechnic University.

Professor Tang's resume:

Tang Tao, a computational mathematician. Born in Shucheng, Anhui Province in May 1963, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Peking University in 1984 and obtained a doctorate from the University of Leeds in 1989. He most recent achievement is  being elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science in 2017. Currently, he is the Vice-President of SUSTech, Dean of the Graduate School and professor of mathematics.

Professor Tang is mainly engaged in computational mathematics. He and his collaborators proposed a conservation-type mobile grid approach that overcomes the key difficulties in mobile grid computing, making high-dimensional computing possible and pioneered by international peers; he derived efficient scaling factor formulas using the infinite region spectral method of this formula to greatly accelerate computational efficiency and it has been successfully applied in many fields of scientific computing. In addition, for the non-homogeneous conservation law's time splitting method, he and his collaborators first gave the estimates of the convergence order, and the theoretical framework established thereafter has been the basis of many follow-up works. He has won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award and Feng Kang scientific calculation award, and in 2018 the International Mathematicians Assembly have invited him to give a talk at their annual meeting.

He taught at the University of Simon Fraser in Canada from 1990 to 1998 and then obtained tenure there. In 1998 he joined the Hongkong Baptist University and served as Director of the Department of Mathematics, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice-President. He is a SIAM Fellow, the former president of the Hong Kong Mathematical Society, before joining SUSTech in 2015.

He is also a Pearl River Scholar, endorsed by the Ministry of Education and won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award, the 2007 National Science and Technology Award of Higher Education (first prize of Natural Science), the National Outstanding Youth (Overseas) Science Fund Award, the Calculation Award and the Leslie Fox Prize for numerical analysis.

Text: Wang Ziyi, Luo Heng Yuan (Student News Agency)

Translated by: Jeremy Welburn / Yingying Xia