Academician Li Daqian(right) was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award 2020
Li Daqian, Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Fudan University, received the Distinguished Teaching Award 2020, after Academician Wen Yumei, another Fudan educator, won it the last year. Jointly launched by China Teacher Development Foundation and Chen Yidan Foundation, it is a most recognized award in China to honor educators at universities.
For the last 63 years, Li has been unremittingly dedicating himself to mathematical education.
Li assumed many responsibilities in the mathematical education for university students. He served as the director for MOE (Ministry of Education) Higher Education Teaching Committee on Mathematics and Statistics for 2 terms, and chaired the Organization Committee of China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM) for 20 years.
To draw people’s attention to the importance of mathematics, he participated in the publication of many approachable maths books, serving as the editor-in-chief of Mathematical Culture Series and 100,000 Whys (Mathematics, 6th edition), etc.
As Rome was not built in a day, Li understands the importance of mathematics in elementary and secondary education. In 2018, he volunteered to lead the mathematics division at a municipal teaching reform center in Shanghai which was responsible for steering the education reform in primary and secondary schools, directing the publication of the new mathematics textbooks for high school students and giving lectures to high school teachers on how to teach with the new textbooks.
Academician Li Daqian
In the early 1980s, Fudan formed a research group focusing on applied partial differential equation. Li is one of the leading mathematicians in the group.
It was normal practice that every student was matched with only one tutor. However, Li introduced a new rule which encourages graduate students to seek guidance from all the tutors within the team to bring in different perspectives to their work.
“Everyone should know what their fellow researchers are working on and be ready to offer their expertise when necessary,” said Li. Applying this rule to their work, all researchers are used to collaborating and exchanging their research progress with each other, feeling inspired during their conversations.
Associate Professor Qu Peng was then a doctoral candidate and is a tutor now in the group. He recalled that every time he posed a question, the tutors would respond from different perspectives based on their own experience. Some showed him relevant academic papers, and they weren’t bothered to dig around for those old papers difficult to access from current databases.
“Professor Li told us that publishing papers shouldn’t be the sole pursuit of a researcher and he encourages us to be a real mathematician,” said Zhao Na, a PhD student who graduated from Fudan last year.
Li teaches students not only knowledge but also life values. He cares about his students’ career development, giving every graduate student career advice based on their personalities and situations. He had great confidence in his students. Once he even wrote a recommendation letter that ran three pages for a student seeking a postdoc fellowship.
Though time flies, the group renews its vitality through generations of Fudaners, achieving fruitful results in partial differential equation, control theory for distributed parameter systems and industrial applied mathematics. Many researchers who have joined the group are now teaching at Fudan University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, University of Florida, Université de Strasbourg, Chinese University of Hong Kong, etc.
