Graduated from a vocational high school and started from a junior college, why is he one of the top 2% of scientists in the world?

On September 16, 2024, Stanford University in the United States released a list of the top 2% of scientists in the world. Professor Xu Zeshui of Sichuan University once again ranked in the top 100 of the annual scientific impact list for his outstanding performance in the academic field. (He ranked in the top 200 in the global lifetime scientific impact list from 2021 to 2023, ranked 30th in the world in the annual scientific impact ranking in 2019, and ranked first among Chinese scholars).

It is worth mentioning that among all the candidates with international backgrounds, Xu Zeshui's experience is particularly special: he was born in a grassroots background, studied in a vocational high school, and "started from scratch" with a college degree, and then fought back: he became a teacher in a vocational high school, the chief professor of a military academy, and later served as a distinguished professor at Sichuan University. Today, he is a famous expert in the field of decision-making in my country, the originator of the study of probabilistic linguistic multi-attribute decision-making; he has been the top scholar in the field of computer science in China for many years; he has 3 academicians and 5 international academic fellows... He is known as the "sweeping monk" in the field of computer science in China.

Xu Zeshui (Photo courtesy of Qufu Normal University Alumni Network)

Grassroots counterattack: vocational high school students walk out of the cheating life

Xu Zeshui was born in 1968 in a poor family in Nanling, Anhui Province. In order to find a job as soon as possible, he chose to study in a vocational high school. During his studies, he did not give up his dream of climbing the ivory tower and completed the three-year high school curriculum by self-study. In 1987, he was successfully admitted to the Department of Mathematics of Wuhu Normal College in Anhui Province (merged into Anhui Normal University in 2005), becoming the only college student among the science students in the vocational high school that year.

After graduation, Xu Zeshui returned to his alma mater vocational high school to work as a mathematics teacher. At that time, most of his colleagues had junior college degrees, and many chose to continue their studies through the path of "junior college to undergraduate" to achieve rapid promotion and better treatment. However, Xu Zeshui did not take the usual path and chose a rugged path that seemed incredible to those around him - directly applying for graduate school.

It is self-evident how difficult it is for a junior college student to achieve such a promotion. Xu Zeshui has endured temptations and hardships that ordinary people can hardly imagine. Many colleagues at that time would relax their tired brains and bodies by chatting or playing cards after completing exams and teaching tasks. When their laughter rang in his ears, Xu Zeshui was still studying hard; what was even more challenging was that most of the colleagues who later "promoted from junior college to undergraduate" passed the exams, not only did they have higher salaries, but they could also use their spare time to earn some extra money.

Such a quick "knowledge monetization" is undoubtedly very attractive to Xu Zeshui, a young man from a large rural family who shoulders the earnest expectations of his family. However, he still did not change his ambition. He said: "Since I have set the goal of taking the postgraduate entrance examination, I must work hard and down-to-earth." "No matter what temptation there is, it cannot change my goal of taking the postgraduate entrance examination and engaging in academic research."

God will not let down those who work hard. After six years of hard study, Xu Zeshui was admitted to the master's program of Qufu Normal University in 1995 and studied at the school's Institute of Operations Research. With his outstanding performance, he was assigned to the Communication Engineering College of the PLA University of Science and Technology (now the PLA Army Engineering University) as an assistant professor in 1998.

In this military academy, he not only embarked on the academic path he had always dreamed of, but also started a "cheating" life: he was promoted twice in a row in just 6 years, and completed the rapid growth from assistant teacher to professor. During this period, he continued to work hard - he completed his doctoral studies in management at Southeast University one year ahead of schedule, and his doctoral dissertation was nominated for the National Top 100 Doctoral Dissertations; afterwards, he worked in the Southeast University Postdoctoral Mobile Station and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Tsinghua University for the second time.

In 2008, at the age of 40, Xu Zeshui became the youngest chief professor at the PLA University of Science and Technology. More than ten years of military career not only enabled him to advance successfully in his academic career, but also strengthened and sublimated his self-discipline and hard-working spirit. In 2023, Xu Zeshui joined Sichuan University as a distinguished professor.

Xu Zeshui returns to his alma mater to give a report to students (Photo courtesy of Qufu Normal University official website)

Obsessed Calculator: The fragrance of flowers attracts butterflies

Xu Zeshui's research spans many fields, including operations research, management, electronic information science, computer science, and AI image processing. He has been engaged in research in decision theory and technology for a long time, creatively opened up many important research fields such as uncertain language decision-making, and systematically created a complex information decision-making theory and method system. Since he started working in the military academy, he has continued to tackle key problems in the basic science field of "operators".

In short, operators are tools that help us extract useful conclusions from a large amount of information. The average we are familiar with is one of them. In 1988, foreign scientific research experts proposed the operator concept of ordered weighted average, which assigns different weights to different information to obtain a more scientific integrated result. For example, when scoring a competition, removing the highest and lowest scores is an application of this operator.

With the advancement of technology, operators are becoming more and more important in many fields. For example, how to obtain more accurate intelligence from different reconnaissance data in military reconnaissance, or how to obtain more scientific evaluation results when evaluating a person's comprehensive ability. Existing operator methods have limitations, and more new operators need to be studied to help us make more scientific decisions.

Xu Zeshui is very obsessed with the study of operators. Through systematic and in-depth research on the theory of data information integration operators, he extended some major data information integration operators from deterministic environments to uncertain and fuzzy language environments, overcame difficulties in the field of operators, and proposed more than ten new operators for integrating data information. He published a book of more than 300,000 words, "Uncertain Multi-Attribute Decision-making Methods and Applications". Related scientific research has attracted attention at home and abroad in the field of basic theoretical research in information science and decision science.

Due to his outstanding contributions in the field of decision-making, he has received numerous honors and laurels: candidate for the National Hundred Thousand Talents Program, winner of the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund and the China Youth Science and Technology Award, young and middle-aged expert with outstanding contributions to the country, expert with special allowance from the State Council, first and second prizes in the Natural Science Award of the Outstanding Scientific Research Achievement Award of Higher Education Institutions, Thomson Reuters China Citation Laureate Award-Highly Cited Scientist Award...

Xu Zeshui has also been selected as a highly cited scientist (computer and engineering) in the world for many consecutive years, and has topped the list of Chinese scholars in the field of computer science for six consecutive years from 2014 to 2019. While teaching at Sichuan University, he further exerted the academic characteristics of multidisciplinary cross-integration, and achieved pioneering scientific research results in the fields of intelligent decision-making, information fusion, fuzzy mathematics and optimization algorithms. In 2020 alone, the number of papers he published reached 84!

With his outstanding scientific research achievements and activeness, Xu Zeshui has gained wide international attention. He has successively won three academician titles: Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Fellow of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetics. He has also been awarded the honor of "Fellow" by world-renowned societies such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the International Association for Fuzzy Systems, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the British Computer Society, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is the first Chinese scholar to have won all five fellowships at the same time, becoming a well-known scholar with an international reputation.

What many people did not expect was that such an internationally renowned scholar was born, raised, studied and became successful in China. Until now, he has only been to Hong Kong for a visiting scholar trip. He is really capable, and he will not be afraid of mountains and seas. "Good wine needs no bush, and fragrant flowers will attract butterflies."