At the 2023 Zhongguancun Forum plenary session, Caucher Birkar, 2018 Fields Medal winner and professor of Tsinghua University's Qiu Chengtong Center for Mathematical Sciences, delivered a keynote speech.

Kochel Birkar talked about,Historically, any country that wants to get ahead has to make huge investments in science, and he expects China to do the same.

Mathematics, he says, is a very large body of human knowledge that began 4,000 years ago. The difference between mathematics and any other discipline or science is that no matter what the result is, it will always exist and not be replaced by other things. What happened 2000 years ago is still valid now, and it keeps getting stronger and stronger.

Now, he says, to improve math education, children need to be interested. The question is who can make math interesting. This problem is not only a problem in China, it is a problem in the world.

Secondly, the mathematics center was established. If we want to have strong applied mathematics we have to have strong pure mathematics or basic mathematics, otherwise applied mathematics is not going to get very far without the support of pure mathematics.

'From my experience, there is growing support for math in China, and I really want that to continue,' he said. Still, China is a big country, and having a few math centers is certainly not enough.

Such a big country needs at least 50 Tsinghua universities, one or two are not enough.So China needs more universities, so we need more support for science, support for mathematics.