Mathematics and Modern Civilization
Abstract
The modern civilization of our age is intimately related to its mathematical activity. From natural science to human society, from high technology to daily life, the indispensable role of mathematics is always everywhere. In this talk, the speaker will combine with his own academic experience to present some aspects about how the modern civilization of our age is influenced by its mathematical activity.
About the speaker
Prof. Wu Zhiming received his DSc in Mathematics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1984. He was President of the Chinese Mathematical Society from 2000 to 2003, and 2008 to 2011. He is currently Professor of the Institute of Applied Mathematics at CAS, and also President of the Chinese Society of Probability and Statistics.
Prof. Ma has made important contributions in the theory of Dirichlet forms and Markov processes. He joint with his co-authors found a new framework of quasi-regular Dirichlet forms which corresponds to right processes in one-to-one manner. This result completes a twenty-year-old problem in the area. The framework of quasi-regular Dirichlet forms has been used, for example, in the study of infinite dimensional analysis, quantum field theory, the theory of Markov processes, and others. Their book An Introduction to the Theory of (Non-symmetric) Dirichlet Forms has been reviewed as “the second major book in the direction of connecting Dirichlet forms with Markov processes” and has been frequently referred. In Malliavin calculus, Prof Ma with his co-authors proved that the capacities of Wiener spaces are invariant under the change of Gross measurable norms. This result settled the problem concerned by Prof P. Malliavin and Prof K. Ito respectively and is of basic for the invariance of Malliavin Calculus. He has also obtained other important results concerning the Schroediner equations, Feynman-Kac semi-groups, Charatheodory-Finsler manifolds, Nowhere Radon smooth measures and others. One of Prof. Ma’s earlier important contributions was his proof of the Feynman-Kac probabilistic representation of mixed boundary problems of Schrodinger operators with measure-valued potentials. In this work he solved an open problem posed by a prominent probabilist Prof. K. L. Chung.
Prof. Ma received numerous awards including the First Class Prize for Natural Sciences by the Academia Sinica, the Max-Plank Research Award by Max-Plank Society and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Chinese National Natural Sciences Prize and the Hua Loo-Keng Mathematics Prize, etc. He is a Fellow of CAS, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Third World Academy of Sciences.
