Mathematician Chen Min has left Purdue University’s maths department to join the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo as a full-time faculty member, the latest Chinese academic to return home from the US.
Chen joins her husband, Shen Jie, at EIT after he accepted an offer to become the new dean of its School of Mathematical Science in 2023. He was previously director of Purdue’s Centre for Computational and Applied Mathematics and a distinguished professor.
The couple met back in 1978 at Peking University’s Department of Mathematics, after universities began enrolling students again following the chaos and turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, when admissions had been suspended for more than a decade.
Both Chen and Shen had sat the college entrance exam when it resumed in 1977, along with millions of others hoping to secure a university place.
Mathematician Zhang Yitang – known for his groundbreaking work on the “twin prime conjecture” in number theory – was among their classmates.
