On December 3, 2023, the final contest of the Yau Middle School Science Award ended at Tsinghua University. This is the sixteen year of the event. Yu Hanzhang, winner of the Golden Prize in Mathematics and Raffles Academy in Singapore, shared the 2023 Gold Prize in Science with Chao Chuyan, winner of the Biology Gold Prize and Shanghai Middle School. Three teams from Shanghai Soong Ching Ling School, Shanghai Private Heping School, and Beijing 11 School won gold awards in chemistry, computer, and economic and financial modeling respectively.89 teams of more than 100 middle school students from home and abroad showed their strengths and gained a lot.
Shing-Tung Yau and Liu Yi awarded the science gold medal to Yu Hanzhang and Chao Chuyan
Shing-Tung Yau, the general chairman of the competition and the chair professor of Tsinghua University, stood among the middle school students, smiling, as always, together with the young students, always making him look radiant. Speaking about the original purpose of hosting the event, he recalled his two sons participating in the Intel talent competition. He clearly remembers the growth the children gained from it: they became more interested in science and even decided to choose research as a lifelong career.
The event does not charge students to support the operation of the event. He thanked Chen Dongsheng of Taikang Life Insurance, Kong Dongmei of Dongrun Foundation, and Lin Haoyu of Xinguang International Venture Capital Co., Ltd., for allowing him to bring this innovative talent training method that has produced more than ten Nobel Prize winners to China.
Looking back on the 16 years, the level of the participating Chinese students has made great progress."The first time we held a math competition in China, basically our middle school students didn't know much about calculus. Today, our students not only know calculus, but for them, calculus and even advanced mathematics have become very simple tools, can use freely. Some articles can be published in fairly good magazines, and our progress is up to the most advanced level in the world.”
Middle school students learned from the masters
Over the years, the Yau Middle School Science Award has always invited many leading scholars to participate in the evaluation, including the Nobel Prize, Fields Award, and Turing Award winners. This year, nearly 40 well-known scientists at home and abroad, including Huang Naizheng, Tang Benzhong, Hu Shimin, and Shao Feng, academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ralph Martin, Academician of the Academy of Sciences, Wales, served as judges. In the brief exchange and conversation with the top scholars, the children were excited and deeply inspired.
Wu Keyue, from a private Pinghe School in Shanghai, who won the gold medal for computer science, proposed a new statistical machine learning model for word representation to deal with the complex nature of English, which is usually composed of subword elements. She said the scholars' questions expanded the depth and breadth of her understanding of the subject and received some encouraging suggestions, such as using ChatGPT as a tool to analyze and obtain comparative results.
Wu Keyue speaking scene
In middle school, Mr.Yau was accidentally inspired by Mr.Shiing-Shen Chern, and he was determined to become a world-class scholar. Yau took the famous mathematician Euler as an example, who was influenced by the Bernoulli father and son. Japanese physicist Yukawa Hideki lived in the countryside when he was young. Although he had not listened to Einstein's lectures, he read a lot of Einstein's autobiography and speeches, so he chose to study physics.
The judges invited to be the Yau Middle School Science Award not only participated in a simple evaluation, but also gave the children love, suggestions for students' preliminary thinking, and lofty goals for young scholars with their knowledge and demeanor.
The exam site
Ralph Martin, a professor of the Academy of Sciences, Wales and Cardiff University, said that scientific research is not only about doing things but also communicating with people, showing results, oral defense, and listening to feedback. True breakthroughs, often occur by chance, such as the discovery process of discovering penicillin. For research, finding a good problem is the most difficult problem. Good problems, usually not planned, should be widespread, connected to reality, and solvable.
Ralph Martin at the exam site
Professor Zhou Jingliu of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology encouraged everyone to observe more and ask questions constantly. For example, how do these habitual phenomena happen? What is the mechanism behind it? Sometimes, he said, when students have too many questions, teachers may be impatient, but it doesn't matter. It is the right way to ask questions. He suggested focusing on the problem itself and not chasing technology too much. Only by paying attention to the problem itself, with new technology, can we enter the stage of solving the problem.
Zhou Jingliu spoke at the award ceremony
Mr.Yau urged the students to communicate with the master, to set lofty goals, to learn really, and to master as many basic tools as possible as soon as possible.
Examination and learning
Middle school cultivates interest; university cultivates a good foundation, when students contact with various disciplines, and get full development; after entering the institute, students should make first-class research. This is Mr.Yau's consideration for cultivating excellent mathematicians.
In this year's competition, middle school students from Singapore, Thailand, India, and other Asian countries performed well, showing high creativity and imagination. It also led him to think further about the challenges facing basic education.
Mr.Yau is at the exam site
Mr.Yau called for a change in the way China can prepare for basic education exams as soon as possible, and to focus on protecting children's interest and curiosity, to cultivate the next generation full of creativity and imagination."Learning is not for the examination. We need to learn all kinds of tools, but also to enhance our curiosity, and the interest in learning."" Creative ideas and basic training tools come together, and I think that's a very important thing.”
"Curiosity is the best motivation for mankind."Chao Chuyan, the winner of Shanghai Middle School, mentioned that his father had always used it to encourage him to ask questions about various things and cultivate his curiosity about things.
Chao Chuyan speaking scene
In this competition, he took the title "The mechanism research of the ivy climbing form and the discovery of the ground orientation of the plant stems" to explore why the ivy can successfully climb the wall. The biological phenomenon he accidentally discovered in the park aroused his curiosity. In the process of research, he used an anatomical mirror, microscope, automatic slicer, and other tools to experiment repeatedly experiments, and successfully explored the phenomenon that "the top of the ivy has positive orientation", which has never been found before. This not only allowed him to find the ingenious evolution of plants but also has some application value in the field of horticulture and agriculture in the future."My research topic may not be the most difficult, but it stems entirely from curiosity. This reflects that scientific problems originate from nature and return to nature. I think this is the greatest charm of science.”
Qiu believes that in the field of basic science, China's growth over the past decade is unimaginable. The level of excellent college students is close to the world's first-class level, but the graduate students are not enough. He hopes the competition will be combined with university education to preserve China's next generation of scientific research talents and become the backbone of China's first-class research institute. Students also need to see the progress of Chinese universities and choose to stay at home to complete their studies.
"We hope to achieve world-class learning in China, which is our expectation, and we also have great confidence that we can accomplish it.”
Text: Niu Yun, Wang Yiting
Typography: Wang Yiting
