(Correspondent Zhao Shen) Su Shi, a famous poet in ancient China, once said that getting something concisely from a broad reading and act with restraint on the base of a large accumulation, which is interconnected with Loo-Keng Hua’s opinion. On April 11, invited by School of Mathematics, Tianjin University, Academician Yan Jia’an of CAS gave our faculty and students a lecture about imagination, intuition and inspiration for learning.
Innovation was the key to scientific research, Professor Yan said, and the highest level of innovation was the emergence of new ideas and new theories, such as calculus created by Newton and Leibniz, differential geometry created by Gauss and Riemann and the group theory created by Loo-Keng Hua.
When talking about how to innovate, Professor Yan said: “My personal experience is to have a long-term accumulation of knowledge and choose a good research subject that you are interested in, and also a strong desire to solve the problem.”
Taking Euler’s proposition of topology as an example, he emphasized that imagination is more important than knowledge in innovation, pointing out that there are many vivid examples on creating new theories through imagination in the history of mathematical development. On how to develop imagination, he put forward that imagination is closely related to one’s artistic accomplishment according to his own experience in scientific research topic selection and thesis writing.
In addition, Professor Yan believed that innovation needs intuition and inspiration, as well as aesthetic feeling and opportunities. Finally, he concluded with Wang Guowei’s three realms of academic research, telling students to cherish lofty ambition, make hard exploration and have ultimate insight.
At the meeting, listeners also had in-depth exchanges with Academician Yan Jia’an on the choice of research directions, the development of financial mathematics, and knowledge accumulate.
