After becoming popular with a simple image and conversation last year, Wei Dongyi, a young scholar at Peking University, recently boarded the hot search list of social platforms again. According to some media reports, this time with Wei Dongyi's popularity, there are several stories - "the equations of six doctors were solved by Wei Dongyi every minute", "Harvard broke the Centennial school rules for him", and so on.
Wei Dongyi teaches for the students in the class of Peking University
Although these stories have various details, they are still not personally confirmed by the parties involved in the event. On the contrary, after various dissemination on the Internet, they have a little dramatic color. For example, a screenshot shows that six doctors recharge Wei Dongyi's bus card as a token of gratitude. Such a story is somewhat entertaining. Even if the matter is true, the excessive discussion of these details deviates from the essence of paying attention to Wei Dongyi.
Wei Dongyi is excellent. He won the gold medal in the International Olympic mathematics competition at the age of 16 and was escorted to Peking University. All these are enough to prove his own excellence and professional talent. Even during the period of public opinion, Wei Dongyi can focus on his own research and continue to take the courses arranged by the school. This focus on mathematics is valuable in the current academic environment, which is one of the reasons why he is highly respected by netizens.
In addition to his academic focus, Wei Dongyi is more of an ordinary person. For example, he likes to take a bottle with a torn package that can hold 1.5 liters of purified water in class and eat the most common pasta - steamed bread. These are Wei Dongyi's behaviors in daily life and the normal performance of young scholar Wei Dongyi as an ordinary person. These humanized elements should not be over interpreted in the online stories, but paint the hero with the fantasy color of martial arts novels.
It should be clear that the pursuit of martial arts novels will not benefit Wei Dongyi too much, and the wide dissemination of some rumors and stories that have not been confirmed by the parties will only further label and moralize Wei Dongyi's image in the eyes of the public. In the long run, more people will impose their own ideas and cognition formed by some stories on Wei Dongyi, even though these people may not have seen Wei Dongyi in reality.
In response to the media, the dean of the school of mathematics of Peking University said that Wei Dongyi was very devoted to mathematics. He just had a simple lifestyle, and we respected his wishes. In fact, this should become the basic attitude of public opinion towards Wei Dongyi. It is a very rare thing in the current public opinion field not to deify a person excessively, respect his humanized way of expression and way of life, and treat a young scholar with an ordinary heart.
In fact, many previous cases show that once public opinion moralizes and deifies a person, it is easy to fall into the logic of rice circle, only see his single aspect, and ignore the diversity and complexity of this person as an individual. Once this person is "revealed" to have some practice, or his private behavior is inconsistent with the stereotype in public opinion, it will lead to the active counterattack of public opinion, followed by network disputes. We don't want this to happen to Wei Dongyi.
From a broader perspective, because some people have high expectations for Wei Dongyi, they have begun to "analyze" how likely he is to win the fields award. Such expectations are actually a burden for Wei Dongyi. As the "Nobel Prize in mathematics", the difficulty of winning the fields prize is obvious to all. Therefore, even though our academic development has been very fast, so far, only two Chinese mathematicians have won the award, including Qiu Chengtong, a famous mathematician who returned to China to teach some time ago. For Wei Dongyi, what he needs should be a simple academic environment and living environment, rather than being pushed to the altar and mystified by public opinion, and then living according to the idea of public opinion.
Netizens obviously need to face up to the current situation of a discipline, do not over entertain and deify a discipline, and do not over label a young scholar. Let him live his life. Don't attach too much meaning of "I think" to his personal choice. Maybe it's the most important thing to do now. Still that sentence, don't let Wei Dongyi live in the imagination of netizens.