(Ecns.cn)--Liu Jiayi, a junior majoring in applied mathematics at Central South University (CSU) in Hunan Province, captured worldwide attention last year by successfully cracking the Seetapun Enigma, a notoriously difficult mathematical problem that has puzzled the math community for over two decades.
The 22-year-old has now been recommended to skip to graduate school by three academicians at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)， who all agreed in a letter of recommendation to the Ministry of Education that Liu is an "outstanding talent in math."
"Marvelous findings"
The Seetapun Enigma, a conjecture put forward by English mathematical logician David Seetapun in the 1990s, is a problem of reverse mathematics related to Ramsey's Theorem.
Liu suddenly found a way to solve the long unresolved question in October 2010, when he successfully gave a negative answer to the conjecture.
He submitted his findings to the Journal of Symbolic Logic, an internationally authoritative academic journal, and won lavish praise from its editor-in-chief, Denis Hirschfeldt, an expert in mathematical logic and a professor at the University of Chicago.
"As someone whose research into this problem finally came to nothing, I am very delighted to see its final solution, especially with such a wonderful demonstration. Please accept my congratulations on your marvelous findings," Hirschfeldt wrote to Liu.
On September 16 this year, Liu was invited to the Academic Conference on Mathematical Logic at the University of Chicago and delivered a 40-minute report on his research. He was the sole representative of Asian universities.
