特集：中国における数学の研究と教育の現状
Some Aspects of Mathematical Community in China
Zhi-Ming Ma1(Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS, Beijing 100080, China)

The Editor-in-Chief of “Sugaku Tushin” invited me to write an article
to explain “Recent Development of Mathematical Community in China”. Although this task is beyond my capacity, I am still happy to take this opportunity to write “Some Aspects of Mathematical Community in China” based on
my personal knowledge.
In connection with this topic what appears first in my mind is ICM2002,
the International Mathematician Congress held in Beijing in 2002. Needless tosay that the success of ICM2002 is one of the evidences which witness the recent
development of Chinese mathematical community. I would rather pick a small
case in ICM2002 to begin with my essay. The small case is the occurrence thatthe President Jiang Zemin2 helped Professor S.S.Chern3 to adjust microphone
at the Opening Ceremony of ICM2002. By this small occurrence we tested thehigh esteem of a mathematician in China, which reveals a strong supportof Chinese Government towards the development of Chinese mathematicalcommunity. I know that at the Opening Ceremony many mathematicians
noticed this small occurrence and admired the behavior of the President Jiang.
They treasure up the photo of this scene till now.
ICM2002 was organized by the Chinese Mathematical Society (CMS)
under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The history of CMS may trace back to 1935, in the year the Chinese MathematicalSociety was founded. Then in the next year (1936), the Chinese Mathematical1

著者の馬志明教授は 2007 年 1 月より IMU 副総裁（脚注は, 漢字表記などについて編集部の責任で追記したものである）
2
江沢民主席
3
陳省身教授

Society started to publish Journal of Chinese Mathematical Society (later renamed as Acta Mathematicae Sinica), which is the first Mathematical Journal
published in China. The Chinese Mathematical Society was reformed and held
its first general assembly in 1951. At that time Professor Hua Loo-Keng4 waselected to be the first president of the CMS council. Prof.Hua chaired theCMS council till 1983. Afterwards the CMS council has regular elections forevery four years and the subsequent presidents of the council are respectively
WU Wentsun, WANG Yuan, YANG Lo, CHANG Kungching, MA Zhiming
and WEN Lan5 .
In nowadays CMS has developed into an academic society with more than
50000 members all over the mainland China. CMS is also the parent societyof four sub-societies: Computational Mathematical Society, Probability andStatistics Society, Uniform Design Society, and History of Mathematics Society.
Varied mathematical activities are organized constantly by CMS. The Society
presides over two important Awards: Chern Shing-Shen Mathematical Award
and Hua Loo-Keng Mathematical Award. Apart from these, Zhong Jia Qing6
Mathematics Award was also set up by CMS for the outstanding MSc andPhD graduates of Mathematics. Nine acdemic journals are published under
the auspices of CMS, including Acta Mathematicae Sinica (both Chinese series
and English series), Acta Mathematicae Applicatae Sinica (both Chinese seriesand English series), Advances in Mathematics, and others. Currently CMS
sets up nine working committees. Among them one committee, Mathematical
Olympic Committee, is set up specially for the organization of mathematical
Olympiad competitions.
In 2005, CMS celebrated its 70th anniversary and organized a celebrating
conference with the theme “Mathematics 2005: Opportunity and Challenge”.
The conference was held in Weihai, Shandong7 in July 25-29. More than 400
mathematicians from China and abroad attended the conferences including
John M. Ball, President of the International Mathematical Union. Nine invited4華羅庚教授
順に, 呉文俊, 王元, 楊楽, 張恭慶, 馬志明, 文蘭の各教授
6
鐘家慶
7
山東省威海市5

plenary lectures were presented by Noga Alon, John Ball, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, Martin Groetschel, Nick Katz, Yum-Tong Siu, Gang Tian, Shing-tung
Yau, and Efim I Zelmanov, respectively.
In addition to CMS, there are also other academic societies related tomathematics and applied mathematics in China. Among them are the China
Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (founded in 1990), the Systems
Engineering Society of China (founded under its present name in 1980), theChinese Association for Applied Statistics (founded in 1979), and the Operations Research Society of China (founded under its present name in 1991).
Like other disciplines of science and technology in China, mathematics
has developed with accelerated speed and has gotten more and more support
from Chinese government under the guide of the reform and opening up policy. In particular, “The Prospect of the 21st Century Mathematics in ChinaForum” held in August 1988 turned out to be a historic event for the Chinese mathematics, since it inspired Chinese mathematicians ever so hard todevelop mathematics with the goal of ranking Chinese mathematics among
the advanced ones in the world in the near future. In the spirit of the Forum, a proposal signed by ten leading Chinese mathematicians was sent to thePremier of the State. A few months later, in December 1988 the State approved the proposal and set up a special foundation, Tianyuan Foundation8 ,for the development of mathematics. The name “Tianyuan” follows from anancient mathematical terminology in China. The Foundation was set up under the management of the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and
was designed to be used under the direction of a special committee, Tianyuan
Foundation Committee, consists of senior Chinese mathematicians. The usage of the Foundation is more flexible than usual projects of NSFC. That is,Tianyuan Foundation can be used to support what is not included in the support scope of NSFC, yet Chinese mathematicians regard it important for thedevelopment and education of Chinese mathematics. Up to now Tianyuan
Fundation has gotten annual budget from Chinese Government and has runvery well under the direction of the Tianyuan Fundation Committee.
8天元基金

Although Tianyuan Foundation is a good example that Chinese mathematicians can direct the usage of some fund by themselves, and it has important influence to the development of Chinese mathematics, I should fairly comment that Tianyuan Foundation is only a very small portion among the totalityof financial support obtained by Chinese Mathematical community. There areseveral channels for Chinese scholars to get financial support for their scientific research: the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), theMinistry of Science and Technology (MOST), the Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) and the Ministry of Education (MOE). In the last two decades various
projects have been created for the purpose of promoting research and educationlevel in China, such as the Knowledge Innovation Project, the National Basic
Research Program, State Key Laboratory, Hundred Talent Project, Yangzhi
Outstanding Scholarship, and so on. It is not the purpose of this article tocomment the positive influence and the things to be improved of all theseprojects. But clearly the development of mathematical research and education
benefits a lot from these projects.
I myself have been involved in the National Basic Research Program.
Therefore I may describe a little more inside about it. The National Basic
Research Program is also called 973 Program. The name “973” refers thatthe program was originated by the suggestion of a group of Chinese scientists
proposed in March 1997. The program is organized and implemented by theMinistry of Science and Technology (MOST). It is created on the basis of existing research activities and deployments made by the National Nature Science
Foundation and major dedicated pre-studies, with the purpose to organize andimplement basic research to meet the major strategic needs of the State. Several projects of the 973 program are implemented mainly by mathematicians.
Among them are “Mathematics Mechanization Methods and Applications”,“Large-Scale Scientific Computation”, and “Some Frontier Problems of CoreMathematics”. I myself was involved in the above mentioned last project.
The main topics to be studied in this project are number theory and algebraic
geometry, representations of groups, modern analysis, stochastic analysis andinfinite dimensional analysis, nonlinear partial diﬀerential equations, variational calculus and geometric analysis, and dynamical systems. The five-year
project was approved in 2000. About 80 mathematicians participated in thisproject and the participants got approximately 50 thousands CNY9 research
grand per person per year within this project. The project was successfullycompleted in 2005. Some mathematicians organized a new 973 project in 2006
with the topics of “mathematics and the intersection between mathematics
and other disciplines of science and technology”.
The above mentioned 973 program is just one example of additional funds
for the Chinese mathematical community. I should emphasize that in themainland China most of the research grants in mathematics are supported byNSFC. NSFC (the Natural Science Foundation of China) was founded in 1986.
Ever since it established, NSFC has continuously strengthened its support tothe development of Chinese mathematics through various projects. Over thepast 20 years, NSFC raised its annual budget for mathematics approximately
eighty times, from 1 million Chinese yuan in 1987 to 80 million Chinese yuan in2007, by funding totally over 4,000 research projects of various categories. We
should note that in China the usage of “research grant” is diﬀerent from thatin other countries. By the present regulation of NSFC, a research grand can
not be used to employ post Doctors or research assistants. The Government
has special budget for the program of post Doctors. The Ministry of Education
has special budget for the program of graduate students.
Mathematical education has also rapidly developed in China. In addition
to their undergraduate education, almost all major universities have graduate schools and accommodate a large number of graduate students and postDoctors. The institutes in the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) have noundergraduate students. But people realize that graduates and post Doctors
are indispensable and active researchers, and are important for the future development of science. Therefore the institutes in CAS have their own graduatestudents and post Doctors. In Beijing we have a Graduate University of CAS(GUCAS). The graduate students in diﬀerent institutes of CAS should all takecourses in GUCAS. Their Ph.D or Master degrees are approved by GUCAS in
combining with their institutes. After the Cultural Revolution, there were only
30 persons as the first batch of graduate students enrolled in the Institute of91 中国元 = 15.33 円 (2007 年 4 月現在)

Mathematics of CAS in 1978. Nowadays the Institute of Mathematics in CAS
has grown to be the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS).
At present there are altogether about 450 graduate students and post Doctors
enrolled in AMSS.
With the favorable environment, the Chinese mathematical community
has made great progress in the last quarter century. Taking an example ofthe area of Probability and Stochastic Analysis (I confine myself in this area
because I am more familiar with it), I am proud of my colleagues such as JiaAn Yan, Mufa Chen, Shige Peng10 and others. They have made contributions
to the development of Probability and Stochastic Analysis, and it is no doubtthat they are world wide renown Probabilists in the international academiclevel. A large number of publications (including articles and monographs) are
written by Chinese mathematicians, there are always Chinese mathematicianspresent their talks at various international academic conferences or workshops,
many Chinese mathematicians serve as editors of international academic journals, or serve as members in various academic organizations. All these revealthat the Chinese mathematical community grows rapidly and has made moreand more influence in the world. But we know clearly that China is still adeveloping country, and there is still a gap between the Chinese mathematicalcommunity and those in advanced developed countries. The Chinese mathematical community will continuously make its eﬀort to work hard, and tostrength its international exchanges and collaborations, with the wish to makemore contributions to the development of mathematics in the world.

Acknowledgement. The author is indebted to CMS Oﬃce and Tianyuan
Foundation Oﬃce for their help in preparing this article.

10順に, 厳加安, 陳木法, 彭実戈の各教授