The academy unveiled the list 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 other sciences and technology fields.

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 chair professor in the Department of Mathematics. He started teaching advanced mathematics classes to SUSTech students right away, and commented that “this is the first time that I am working at this level in a mainland university, and I am looking forward to it”. In the past two years 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 SUSTech’s research culture and in establishing a high quality Graduate School.

On January 9, 2017,  Professor Tang’s research project “Adaptive and High Accuracy Numerical Method and Its Analysis” won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award. It was also the University’s first national natural science award.

Professor Tang’s resume:

Tang Tao, a computational mathematician, was born in Shucheng of Anhui Province in May 1963. He graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Peking University in 1984, and obtained a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Leeds in 1989. He was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science in 2017. He is currently the Vice-President, Dean of the Graduate School, and chair professor of mathematics at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).

Professor Tang’s main research interest is in computational mathematics. He has made important and original contributions to the research of scientific computing, including the development of adaptive grid method and the spectral method, and the establishement of the convergence theory for numerical methods for hyperbolic conservation laws. Prof. Tang was awarded the Leslie Fox Prize for numerical analysis in 1988 and the Feng Kang Prize for scientific computing in 2003.  He has also won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2016. He is an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018), which is regarded as a great honor for mathematicians.

He taught at Simon Fraser University in Canada from 1990 to 1998 and earned a tenure there. In 1998 he joined the Hong Kong Baptist University and served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Dean of the Graduate School and  Associate Vice-President. He also served two terms as president of the Hong Kong Mathematical Society. He joined SUSTech in 2015 as its VP Research.

Professor Tang was elected a Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2012, and a Fellow of American Mathematical Society in 2017. 

Text: Wang Ziyi, Luo Heng Yuan (Student News Agency)
Translated by: Jeremy Welburn / Yingying Xia