To: Julius Wong who wrote (217644 ) 11/12/2025 2:43:30 AM From: TobagoJack Respond to of 218534 re <<seventh sense >> ... another one, with whatever passes for sensescmp.com Rising star mathematician Wu Meng returns to China from Finland Now affiliated with Hunan University, the award-winning professor solved a major part of Furstenberg’s conjecture dating to the 1960s Shi Huang Published: 2:15pm, 12 Nov 2025Updated: 2:41pm, 12 Nov 2025 In the 1960s, mathematician Hillel Furstenberg proposed a conjecture: that a number cannot appear “simple and highly regular” under two “independent” rulers simultaneously. Put simply, if a number is written in a binary system – using only two digits or elements to represent a quantity – its sequence is relatively regular and simple. In contrast, when rewriting that number in ternary – using three elements as its base – its sequence will almost certainly become relatively more complex and different in structure. The conjecture seems intuitively obvious, yet for half a century the part relating to intersecting sets went unproven. That changed in 2019 when Chinese mathematician Wu Meng, then an associate professor at the University of Oulu, one of Finland’s largest universities, solved the problem. Wu obtained his PhD from the University of Picardy Jules Verne in France in 2013. Photo: Handout Afterwards, Wu published “A Proof of Furstenberg’s Conjecture on the Intersections of ×p and ×q Invariant Sets” in Annals of Mathematics, a top journal. The work earned him the 2023 International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) Best Paper Award. The ICCM is a leading academic conference for the global Chinese mathematics community. The award given to Wu recognises the most outstanding paper worldwide by a mathematician of Chinese descent within the preceding five years. Now, the mathematician has embarked on a new chapter: conducting his research in China. According to Hunan University’s website, Wu joined the university’s school of mathematics in August as a full-time professor in fundamental mathematics. The South China Morning Post has contacted Wu for comment. Wu’s studies took him to the University of Picardy Jules Verne in France, where he enrolled in 2006 to study mathematics. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Picardy, then earned his PhD in mathematics there in 2013. Later he held postdoctoral positions at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Sweden’s Mittag-Leffler Institute. A focus of Wu’s research has been ergodic theory, particularly number expansions in different bases, such as the decimal and binary systems. This field exemplifies a central challenge in mathematics: propositions that seem evident often demand rigorous proof. For instance, it remains unknown whether the digit zero appears infinitely often in the decimal expansion of 3.14159265359 … – the number pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter – though data suggests it does. It was while Wu was a researcher at the University of Oulu that he took note of Furstenberg’s conjecture and sought to investigate it. He received a grant from the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters to conduct related research. Furstenberg’s conjecture dates to the 1960s, when the American-Israeli mathematician – who won the Abel Prize and Wolf Prize, two of the most prestigious awards in mathematics – approached the challenge from a different perspective. Rather than confining his research to the expansion of numbers in a single base, such as a decimal system, Furstenberg proposed examining their expansions simultaneously in two different bases, such as decimal and binary systems. The decimal and binary expansions of a number are independent of each other. Meanwhile, the binary and quaternary expansions of a number are interdependent, as a base of four could be seen as an expanded form of a base of two. Wu made significant progress towards the conjecture by showing that nearly all numbers adhere to it. Any exceptional numbers, if they exist at all, would form a tiny subset of all numbers. In more technical terms, the family of these outstanding numbers has a fractal dimension approaching zero. In the language of mathematics, this means a complete proof. For his efforts, Wu received the Frontiers of Science Award in July at the International Congress of Basic Science at Tsinghua University. The honour came just before he joined Hunan University.