A mathematician originally from Shanghai has won a top international award for her work in a field that she said could “feel lonely” sometimes.
Yilin Wang, 33, is a junior professor at France’s Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies), which supports advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics.
The 2024 Salem Prize, which is overseen by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, was announced at the end of October. This year, the prize committee handed out two awards – one to Wang and the other to Argentinian mathematician Miguel Walsh.
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Established in 1968 in honour of the famous Greek mathematician Raphael Salem, the annual prize is given to young researchers for outstanding work on harmonic analysis and related topics.
Wang received the award for “developing deep novel connections between complex analysis, probability, and mathematical physics, particularly with regards to Teichmuller theory and the theory of the Schramm-Loewner evolution”, according to the IAS website.
She is the third person of Chinese origin to win the prize, following professor Dapeng Zhan of Michigan State University, and the renowned Terence Tao, who at the age of 24 was appointed as the youngest full professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006, aged 31, Tao received the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics.
“Yilin Wang has uncovered many new features and approaches to study the Schramm-Loewner evolution that drives many important random structures in the complex plane”, said Tao, the scientific committee chairman for this year’s Salem Prize.
But Wang stressed to the South China Morning Post that she did not want the media to shine too much light on her “halo”, and instead considered the honour an encouragement for young people.
“Most research in mathematics can only be comprehended by [a] few mathematicians in specific fields and can feel lonely sometimes, so I am really happy that my work is appreciated by many people,” she said in an email.
Born in 1991, Wang grew up in a nurturing family environment in Shanghai. She attended the Shanghai Foreign Language School – a renowned middle school in the city where students were required to learn a foreign language. Many of her classmates chose English, but Wang opted for French.
The decision would hold unforeseen value later in life, helping to lay the foundations for her future studies and career in France.
While in her third year of high school, the French ministry of education held a recruiting campaign in China for students who excelled in mathematics. Wang did not score particularly well on that exam, but was the only student to answer her questionnaire in French rather than English. This caught the attention of the interviewers and she was eventually accepted into the programme.
Paris has for centuries been the global centre of mathematics, home to celebrated masters such as Rene Descartes and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
After two years at the Lycee du Parc in Lyon, a public secondary school that prepares students to enter elite higher education institutions, Wang was admitted to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2011.
Over the next four years, Wang affirmed her interest in mathematics and decided to further her studies. She obtained two master’s degrees from two other top French universities in 2014 and 2015.
Wang began her PhD studies at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich in 2015, under the supervision of Wendelin Werner, a 2006 Fields Medal winner. After graduating in 2019, she headed to the United States to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a postdoctoral lecturer. She spent three years there before returning to France in 2022 for her current position.
After this year’s Salem Prize was announced, the news quickly flashed across Chinese media and social media platforms. Wang, however, has been keen to play down accolades, stressing that it was just one of many such awards in the field, and that her peers who did not win were no less brilliant.
“I think there’s an awful lot of randomness in the academic community, sometimes it’s just a coincidence that a researcher has had the right opportunity at the right time to solve a puzzle that people happen to be interested in.”
Wang does credit a particular personal trait for her success in the field of mathematics – pure curiosity – along with a strong desire to explore the relationships within the discipline. “Even though there are a lot of questions we could not find answers to, we are lucky enough to learn new things every day,” she said.
At school, Wang rarely competed in maths contests. During her later studies in France, she said she enjoyed exploring the methods of education and inquiry, in which the process of thinking was more important than the final answer.
“I’m not a big fan of the competitive aspects of mathematical research because I think maths is about a group of enthusiasts inspiring each other and working together to solve problems,” said Wang.
Her nature has also influenced her career choices. After a few years as a researcher at MIT, she decided to return to Europe because the US was “too competitive and people tend to work at high intensity”.
Next year, Wang will move to her alma mater – ETH Zurich – to continue exploring the world of mathematics.
“I’m a very free person and being back in Europe suits me better,” she laughed.
More from South China Morning Post:
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