I grew up in a poor rural area belonging to Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China. While in middle school, I became immensely fascinated by mathematics, and realized that my mathematics textbooks could not satisfy my thirst for knowledge. In a region where a library is unheard of, as a first-generation middle schooler, I had a lot of trouble finding extracurricular study materials, but I thoroughly studied the few good books I could get. In my last year in high school (that was in fact my second year in high school, which consisted of two years only back then), I transferred to a much better high school, Yongdeng County No. 2 High School, and participated in various high school mathematics competitions, culminating in the Top Prize in the Gansu Province Mathematics Competition in 1979. Later that year, I entered\u00a0Lanzhou University, a leading university in China, and obtained my B.Sc. in mathematics in 1983, at the age of 20. Then I spent three years at\u00a0Beijing Normal University, graduating with a M.Sc. in Mathematics in 1986. After teaching briefly at Hebei Normal University, I went to North Carolina State University, where I got my Ph.D. in mathematics (with concentration in algebra) in 1990 and published two papers on matrix theory.\u00a0\u00a0I have been working at GSU since 1991. Thanks to two influential colleagues and collaborators, Drs. Frank Hall and Carolyn Eschenbach,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5083,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"class_list":["post-5082","committee","type-committee","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n