Time: May 18, 2026, 15:00—17:00
Venue: Room B206, Humanities Building, Tsinghua University
Topic: Mathematics, History and Philosophy: A Unified Framework
Speaker: Professor Ji Lizhen (Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, USA)
How to Identify Valuable Questions in the History of Mathematics?
In this report, I argue that if we can clearly understand the essence of mathematical changes from a philosophical perspective, this problem will become relatively easy. I will outline a dynamic and unified framework for mathematical development and explain how to use this framework to identify key turning points in the evolution of mathematics. These viewpoints will be illustrated through the history of non-Euclidean geometry and its influence.
Li Zhenzhi is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, USA. He obtained his Doctor of Science degree from Northeastern University in the United States in 1991. He has conducted research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton successively, and has been teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in the United States since 1995. He has published more than 40 academic works, and serves as the editor-in-chief or editorial board member of several international academic journals, as well as the editor-in-chief of multiple series of books. He has published more than 100 research papers. He has organized many large-scale international academic conferences, and has successively won the P. Sloan Research Award, the Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States, the Morningside Silver Medal in Mathematics, and the Simons Foundation Award. Professor Li Zhenzhi's research field mainly focuses on the intersection of geometry, topology and number theory. He has achieved world-class original innovative achievements in the compactification of locally symmetric spaces, the spectrum of Riemann surfaces, the trace formula and other aspects, and has published a large number of academic papers in top international mathematics journals. He has solved several long-standing world-famous conjectures such as the Borel Conjecture and the Siegel Conjecture, and has also made important contributions to several other famous conjectures, including the Novikov Conjecture. In recent years, he has developed a strong interest in the history of modern and contemporary mathematics and the history of mathematics education.
