Combinatorial mathematics is the study of complex systems in terms of their elementary parts.
It is a discipline now coming into its full being, the kind of mathematics that China, and even the world, needs for economic development. But in 1977 China resumed its higher education system, and Chen was able to enter Sichuan University in southwestern China in 1980. A recommendation from a noted Chinese mathematician brought him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, where he became a student of combinatorialist Gian-Carlo Rota. Chen received one of Los Alamos' J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellowship in the Computing, Information and Communication Division, a highly competive position, and arrived in Los Alamos in 1991. Currently he has a joint appointment as a staff member with the Laboratory and as a professor of mathematics at Nankai University.