All my life I have been nurtured in and exposed to the wonders of the world of mathematics. Because my father was the deputy director of the Institute o f Quantitative and Technical Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Scie nces, during my childhood I was often surrounded by mathematical data, formu las and charts. As I grew older, I began to realize that by collecting and a nalyzing data and building mathematical models according to the data, my fat her had the power to forecast such grand concepts as the growth rate of the
GDP (Gross Domestic Product). I was astonished by the power of mathematics a nd my curiosity drove me to read as many books as I could in the related fie ld. Gradually, I found that I had stepped into another world, a world of int elligence and aesthetics. I felt that it might be my destiny to probe this w orld. With self-confidence and my father's encouragement, I chose applied mathemat ics as my major in college. Thanks to the excellent faculty who guided me on my pilgrimage across the mathematical universe, my love for mathematics con tinued to bloom. In my analysis courses, I first met the continuous function under the definition of Cauchy. Then, my vision broadened to the Riemann in tegrable function space, which is composed of "almost" continuous functions. With the advent of the set theory, my vision again expanded to the measurab le function under the theory of the Lebesgue Integral. In my algebra courses
, I was equipped with a powerful tool- the matrix. The more knowledge I lear ned, the more useful I found that this tool, especially in numerical analysi s and optimization. When I moved into the real abstruse world of abstract al gebra, I came to realize that mathematical symbols did not have to stand for numbers; for instance, they may represent matrices, quaternions, or transfo rmations. In fact, it