We are proud to announce that Chair Professor Sun Defeng, Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics, has been named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2026. Professor Sun joins a distinguished group of forty mathematicians from around the world who have been selected for this honor in the program’s fourteenth year.
The AMS Fellows program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics. Being elected as an AMS Fellow is an acknowledgement of Professor Sun’s excellence and leadership in the mathematical sciences, as well as his significant impact on the profession.
Professor Sun is internationally renowned for his research in optimization, operations research, and numerical analysis. He has made pioneering contributions to the theory and algorithms for large-scale optimization problems, including semidefinite programming, conic programming, and matrix completion. His work has been widely published in top-tier journals and has had a profound influence on both theoretical developments and practical applications in areas such as data science, engineering, and finance.
In addition to the AMS Fellowship, Professor Sun’s outstanding achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious honors. He was elected Fellow of the Operations Research Society of China (ORSC) in 2024, and named Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the China Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM) in 2020. He received the RGC Senior Research Fellow Award for 2022/23, and was honored with the Beale–Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming by the Mathematical Optimization Society in 2018.
This prestigious recognition is awarded by peers in the international mathematical community, highlighting Professor Sun’s dedication and achievements in advancing mathematics. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Professor Sun Defeng on this remarkable accomplishment.
To view the names and institutions of the full 2026 Class of AMS Fellows, please visit the AMS Fellows webpage.
