{"id":135371,"date":"2025-11-12T06:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T06:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/135371\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T06:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T06:55:08","slug":"rising-star-mathematician-wu-meng-returns-to-china-from-finland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/135371\/","title":{"rendered":"Rising star mathematician Wu Meng returns to China from Finland"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1960s, mathematician Hillel Furstenberg proposed a conjecture: that a number cannot appear \u201csimple and highly regular\u201d under two \u201cindependent\u201d rulers simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Put simply, if a number is written in a binary system \u2013 using only two digits or elements to represent a quantity \u2013 its sequence is relatively regular and simple.<\/p>\n

In contrast, when rewriting that number in ternary \u2013 using three elements as its base \u2013 its sequence will almost certainly become relatively more complex and different in structure.<\/p>\n

The conjecture seems intuitively obvious, yet for half a century the part relating to intersecting sets went unproven.<\/p>\n

That changed in 2019 when Chinese mathematician Wu Meng, then an associate professor at the University of Oulu, one of Finland\u2019s largest universities, solved the problem.<\/p>\n

\"WuWu obtained his PhD from the University of Picardy Jules Verne in France in 2013. Photo: Handout<\/p>\n

Afterwards, Wu published \u201cA Proof of Furstenberg\u2019s Conjecture on the Intersections of \u00d7p and \u00d7q Invariant Sets\u201d in Annals of Mathematics, a top journal. The work earned him the 2023 International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) Best Paper Award.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1960s, mathematician Hillel Furstenberg proposed a conjecture: that a number cannot appear \u201csimple and highly regular\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[78567,78574,114,78570,78568,78572,8019,78573,78569,78575,78578,61,78571,78576,60,10178,80,44560,78566,78577],"class_list":["post-135371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-abel-and-wolf-prize","tag-annals-of-mathematics","tag-china","tag-chinese-mathematician","tag-department-of-fundamental-mathematics","tag-einstein-institute-of-mathematics","tag-finland","tag-frontiers-of-science-award","tag-furstenbergs-conjecture","tag-hillel-furstenberg","tag-hunan-university","tag-ie","tag-international-congress-of-basic-sciences","tag-international-congress-of-chinese-mathematiciansiccm","tag-ireland","tag-south-china-morning-post","tag-technology","tag-university-of-oulu","tag-university-of-picardie","tag-wu-meng"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}