The 2025 Outstanding Science & Technology Achievement Award was launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on January 28. Zhou Xiangyu, an academician of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), won the prize.

The academic career of Zhou Xiangyu vividly showcased Chinese mathematicians’ inheritance, innovation, and relentless pursuit of excellence.

Zhou Xiangyu was born in Chenzhou, Hunan in 1965. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Department of Mathematics at Xiangtan University in 1985, earned a doctoral degree from Institute of Mathematics, AMSS, CAS in 1990, and obtained a Russian State Scientific Doctorate from the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1998.

He previously served as director of the Institute of Mathematics, AMSS, CAS and vice chairman of the Chinese Mathematical Society (CMS). He has been awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the Qiushi Award for Outstanding Young Scholars, the Shiing Shen Chern Mathematics Award, the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award, the Chen Jiageng Science Award, and the National Innovation and Excellence Award.

In 2013, he was elected as a CAS Member.

Academician Zhou Xiangyu, mentored by Academician Lu Qikeng and other successors of the Hua Luogeng school, has dedicated over thirty years to the field of several complex variables.

He has solved a series of long-standing global mathematical problems.

After a decade of efforts, he conquered the “Extended Future Light Cone Conjecture” originating from quantum field theory, with his achievements documented in authoritative works such as “Mathematical Milestones of the 20th Century” and “The Development of Mathematics: 1950-2000”, earning recognition as “one of the highlights of 20th-century mathematics”.

For the general compact Lie group invariant domains with orbit-connectedness, he established a criterion for their holomorphic hulls to be univalent, resolving this fundamental problem in several complex variables.

In collaboration with others, he addressed the optimal constant problem in the L-extension theorem, thereby proving the famous Suita conjecture proposed four decades earlier as a corollary.

The Outstanding Science &Technology Achievement Award of the CAS is the highest honor bestowed by the CAS upon individuals, representing the most outstanding scientific and technological contributions made in the recent five years.

Chinese source: hunantoday