Tim Sheng, Ph.D., is a professor of mathematics in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.
Contact: Whitney Richter, Director of Marketing and Communications, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, 254-710-7539
Written by: Gary Stokes, Office of the Vice Provost for Research
WACO, Texas (July 26, 2019) – Critics often blame academia for turning inquisitive, broad-minded
students into unidimensional scholars and researchers. But more than a few
academics refuse to follow a laser-thin career path. Indeed, nurturing a broad
perspective in the academy can be challenging, but perhaps less so if your
chosen discipline is one essential to a great many others—as is mathematics.
Baylor mathematics professor and CASPER researcher Qin “Tim”
Sheng, Ph.D., was born into a China in the throes of Cultural Revolution. It
shuttered all universities. While Sheng’s parents were forced away, his
grandmother and an elderly aunt cared for him and his two younger brothers. For
about a decade they knew nothing of their parents’ fates.
Left to themselves and with almost no schooling, Sheng and
his brothers might have gotten into trouble were it not for their insatiable
curiosity. The brothers began to scavenge books that were being purged.
“People basically threw away their books that time. We just
picked up books anywhere, from trash cans, anywhere, and read them,” he said. “Can
you imagine three little boys, ten years old, seven years old, eight years old
together trying to learn calculus from books we never saw before?”
Sheng’s self-study revealed an exceptional aptitude for sciences.
When some of the universities reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution,
he took entrance exams and scored very high.
Sheng studied mathematics at Nanjing University, one of the
top institutions in China. Soon after earning his master’s degree in 1985, Sheng
was accepted to Cambridge University. But without enough money even to travel
to the United Kingdom, much less to attend such a prestigious university,
acceptance was at first a hollow honor. Fortunately, he had attracted the
attention of Schlumberger, a Texas oil and gas technology company with a
penchant for investing in promising young students. He was selected from
hundreds of candidates to receive a foundation scholarship from the energy
giant.
“[The scholarship] paid for everything,” Sheng said, “But I
still did not have any pocket money. So just as I was leaving for the airport
my Nanjing advisor approached to me, ’I have one hundred U.S. dollars that I
have had in my suitcase for many, many years. I have not had a chance to use it,
so you take that $100 with you for your transportation, to buy a drink or food
on the way there.’”
At Cambridge, and later during a post-doctoral appointment
at University College London, Sheng found himself readily accepted into the
company of some of the world’s brightest minds. His Ph.D. advisor, Arieh Iserles, was a fellow of
the King’s College, which nurtured many great scholars such as John Keynes and Alan
Turing, and the office next door was occupied by a brilliant physicist named Stephen
Hawking. “We all had tea together every day.”
At Cambridge, Sheng worked in fluid dynamics and physics,
and in theoretical/applied mathematics. Sheng enjoyed the diversity of work his
position at Cambridge offered, but soon began to receive attractive and lucrative
job offers from outside academia. A large, an international bank in Zurich, UBS,
wanted Sheng to apply his mathematical curiosities to options trading. He
turned down the offer. Later, Japanese electronics giant NEC tried to recruit
him to work on supercomputers. But by this time, he had decided to stay in
academia rather than work in the corporate world, and he refused that job as
well. Then in 1990, an offer came from one of the three highest-ranked
universities in Asia — the National University of Singapore — and he finally decided
to leave Cambridge.
During his five years in Singapore, Sheng did research in classical
mathematics and published several well-received papers. He also met and later married
his wife, Helen, and became the father of two sons. Sheng shortly found pure
mathematics too abstract and began to look for opportunities abroad. “Singapore
was very good, much interesting research. But it is too far away from the
center of research,” said Sheng. “So where is the center of research? It is the
U.S.A.!”
In 1996, Sheng accepted a position with the University of
Louisiana, Lafayette. There he worked on models of combustion, an area of study
he’d begun with Professor Frank Smith, fellow of Royal Society, at University
College London. Though the work was rewarding, Sheng again began to feel that
the real frontiers of his field lay ahead of his work at Louisiana. So, after
another five-year stretch, he sought more advanced work. He found it at the Air
Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, where he discovered cutting-edge research
in computational e-optics. “At Dayton I was pretty successful in my research,”
he says. “Lots of colleagues, very friendly and highly intelligent.”
In 2004, Sheng learned that Baylor was starting a Ph.D.
program in pure mathematics, but it wasn’t until a program in applied
mathematics was added that Sheng began to feel a tug toward Waco. He had first
mentored graduate students at Lafayette, and the idea of again working with
graduate students at Baylor attracted him.
“It was a completely new program and that appealed to me. So I took a half-year leave from Dayton and came here [Baylor].
We discussed with everyone how to go forward, and how I could contribute to the
program,” he recalled. “Work was very interesting, good environment, wonderful
colleagues, and the university was very supportive. That confirmed to me that I
should make the move; otherwise I could have easily stayed in Dayton. But I
wanted to help build the program.”
Joining Baylor in 2005, Sheng quickly began helping to forge
the university’s nascent Ph.D. program into a cohesive, productive enterprise.
“There are certainly lots of things beyond just the research: design courses,
write curriculum, plan research requirements and use my experience at other
universities—including Cambridge—to help the program become strong.”
Most important to Sheng was that at Baylor he finally found free
range to pursue a wider spectrum of work, take on graduate students, offer
undergraduate projects, discuss with postdoctoral associates and explore at the
forefront of his fields. Now in his thirteenth year at Baylor, he has at last ended
his pattern of working in five-year cycles at one place before moving on.
With over a hundred published papers, Sheng is finding his
work accepted and applied in an eclectic mix of disciplines. Since coming to
Baylor, he has published 65 papers in 31 separate peer-refereed journals: 42 in
mathematics journals; 14 in physics; three in computer science; two each in astrophysics,
biochemistry, and engineering. He was invited to deliver keynote or plenary lectures
in 9 international conferences held in 7 different countries recently. His research
is sponsored by agencies including the Air Force Research Laboratory, American
Mathematical Society and industry. He is invited by the National Science
Foundation to serve as a panelist for five consecutive years.
His physics and astrophysics papers stem from his work at Baylor’s
Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics, and Engineering Research (CASPER),
which he joined in 2006, shortly after coming to Baylor.
“I am involved in EUCoS, CASPER’s
Early Universe and Cosmology group with [Drs.] Jerry Cleaver, Anzhong Wang, and Klaus Kirsten. My part is basically to
provide mathematical support, theoretical support, and computation support to
the whole team’s work, which is looking at quantum cosmology. We try to explain
things as small as the solar system, all the way up to the entire universe. We
use a theory to establish a model of this kind of phenomenon … to get a better
understanding of the whole universe. Through that kind of theory, we can reveal
certain new discoveries, like new energy, and this relates to research into
gravitational waves that were just recently discovered.”
As EUCoS director, Cleaver
is appreciative of Sheng for his ability to support the group’s work in a
variety of ways. “Tim provides a unique blend of computational mathematics and numerical
simulations that contributes much to our interdisciplinary projects,” Cleaver
said. “His computational insights are invaluable.”
And Sheng’s horizon extends beyond the sciences as well. While
at Cambridge he became fascinated with philosophy. “Since my time at Cambridge
I have been quite a student of philosophy and a member of the Philosophical
Society there. At Cambridge, mathematics is not a part of natural science; it’s
considered philosophy. So that’s why I was involved in a lot of activities
related to philosophy: language, culture, even linguistics and psychology.”
Sheng co-edits the International
Journal of Computer Mathematics published by Taylor and Francis Group, London,
but he remains most dedicated to teaching and his students.
“I do my best all the way to encourage and to get together
with students. I always tell my graduate
students to be the best teacher first, then be the researcher.”
