In the morming of 25th May, Pro.Chen yongchuan, academician of Chinese academy of sciences, academician of national academy of sciences of developing countries and director of mathematics center of tianjin university and nankai university, visited our college and held a special lecture entitled "the story of combinatorial mathematics" in science and technology building 104.

From the most basic classification of sets, academician Chen explained the knowledge system of combinatorial mathematics from simple to deep. In addition to the basic knowledge of set theory that you have learned since high school, combinatorial mathematics has more abundant connotations, such as bell number to describe the number of partition, Stirling number to describe the set containing fixed elements and the number of certain partition blocks. Academician Chen broadens and deepens people's understanding of combinatorial mathematics with an accessible knowledge framework.

After that, Chen's talk about stable pairing brought the atmosphere to a climax. The matching problem, as its name implies, is about the set partition of reaching the ideal state, and its application fields are very extensive. For example, the "marriage theorem" proved by British mathematician Philip Hall in the last century extended the category of combinatorial mathematics to the marriage problem that everyone has to experience. Academician Chen encouraged the female students to take the initiative and pursue boldly when they met the boy they liked, because "according to the theory, the one who takes the initiative is more likely to find the opposite sex he likes.

Then, academician Chen explained the minimum cut theorem of maximum flow and grid coloring, and interacted with the students. The lecture ended in warm applause.

His research interests include combinatorial mathematics and its applications in theoretical computer science, mathematical physics and computational biology. He was honored by the outstanding young science foundation of the first national natural science foundation of China.In 2011, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese academy of sciences.