SIAM Fellow John E. Hopcroft received China’s Friendship Award in a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on September 29, 2016. Hopcroft is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University. The Friendship Award is the highest honor given by the People’s Republic of China to foreign experts who have made significant contributions to the country’s economic and social progress.
“Talent is uniformly distributed around the world, and China has one fourth of the world’s talent,” Hopcroft said. “Helping China improve university education is an opportunity to impact the lives of 40 million students. To have this scale of impact is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the reason that I have spent the last five years helping China improve its university system.”
SIAM Fellow John E. Hopcroft (left) receives the Friendship Award from Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai (right) in September. Photo credit: Official Photo.