Mathematician finds balance and beauty in math
Since he was a child growing up in Changzhou, China, Zhiwei Yun’s appetite for mathematics was nothing but linear, growing with each year as he absorbed lessons and solved increasingly difficult problems, both in the classroom and on his own time, with a zeal that can only come from finding one’s true passion. But when Yun was a graduate student, he felt his trajectory come up short. In his third year, he was in a panic as he faced for the first time the difference between learning established mathematics and discovering new math as a researcher. But his advisor Bob MacPherson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, kept encouraging him to find his own way, saying “only a problem found by yourself can really interest and drive you to the final solution.” “It was a hard time,” Yun recalls. “The hardest part of pure math research was knowing whether and...