YKGY

• 1 Background

Jiang Boju, male, was born in Tianjin on September 4, 1937. His ancestral home is Pingyang, Zhejiang (now Longgang City, Zhejiang Province). He is a mathematician and Topology Scientist. In 1957, Jiang Boju graduated from the department of mathematics and mechanics of Peking University and stayed on to teach there. He successively made research visits to the institute of advanced study in Princeton, and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, and the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 1980, he was elected member of the department of mathematical physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1985, he was elected as a member of the Third World Academy of Sciences. In 1988, he was awarded the Chen Chun-Shen Prize for Mathematics. He served as the first President of the School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University from 1995 to 1998; In 1996, he was awarded the Liang Heli Foundation Award for scientific and technological progress; Hua Luogeng Mathematics Prize in 2002; In 2006, he was awarded the Teaching Award by the Ministry of Education.

• 2 Career

Since 1958, he has been teaching for 46 years. He has been devoted to improving his teaching skills and paying great attention to his students. He has always been concerned about the reform of mathematics education and the cultivation of talents. As a leading expert in the field of topology, Jiang Boju is still teaching at the age of 70. Jiang Boju always stressed that his job was teaching and educating people was his first duty. "I am a teacher first and a researcher second,” he once said. After returning from his overseas visit, Jiang Boju felt deeply that Chinese mathematics should catch up with the world’s advanced level, hoping that the next generation would carry on. ”As a university teacher, cultivating a group of outstanding talents is more valuable than one or two achievements. The most urgent task at present is to make great efforts to train the young generation.” Based on this idea, for many years, Jiang Boju insisted on offering courses to undergraduates and postgraduates, and spent a lot of time preparing new courses, trying to impart the latest academic achievements and ideas of the world to students, so that students could catch up with the new level of international mathematical research as soon as possible.

• 3 Achievement

Jiang Boju mainly engaged in the study of Fixed Point Theory and Low Dimen- sional Topology. He proposed the concept of trace groups in the 1960s. He made the first breakthrough in the calculation of Nielsen number in several decades and applied the theory and methods of low-dimensional topology after 1979. He has made outstanding achievements in the study of the minimum fixed points of the mapping class, in particular, he has comprehensively solved the Nielsen fixed point speculation which has existed for more than half a century. In the late 1980s he extended Nielsen’s fixed point theory to periodic points, opening the way for its application to dynamical systems.