A Brief History of Mathematics

Cai Tianxin was born in Taizhou, in southeastern China in 1963. He received his doctorate in science in 1987 from Shandong University, and currently serves as an outstanding professor at the School of Mathematics at Zhejiang University. In his capacity as a professor of mathematics, Cai proposed a class of Diophantine equations that was hailed as a “truly original contribution” by the British mathematician and recipient of the Fields Medal Alan Baker. He is also a poet, writer, and photographer, who has published more than forty literary and scholarly works, translated variously into more than twenty languages, including seven works translated into English. For his poetical and literary works, Cai was awarded the Naji Naaman Poetry Prize (Beirut) in 2013, and the Kathak Literary Award(Dakar) in 2019. In 2022, he was selected as an influential writer on Dangdang (the Chinese analogue to Amazon.com).