December 27th saw the start of the second annual meeting of the International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan province, China. The ICCM has been selecting the best papers of Chinese mathematicians since 2013. Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) Assistant Professor of Mathematics Li Qin and his collaborators won the Best Papers Award this year and received the award from outstanding mathematician Shing-Tung Yau.

Li Qin had his award-winning paper published in the international mathematical journal Advances in Mathematics in 2017. The comment of the award is that “This paper constructs a rigorous quantum field theory that directly relates the algebraic index theorem with important physics interpretation”.

All the winning papers went through two rounds of strict screening. In the first round of selection, 20 different branch committees selected the nominated articles, and the second round saw professors from top universities form a jury to vote on the papers and ultimately determine a winner.

Li Qin is an assistant professor in the department of Mathematics, SUSTech. He got his B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). He has been conducting postdoctoral research at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany and  the Department of Mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.