The founding of N University’s computer research unit was both an institutional initiative and a personal reversal. Young Lillie secured government funding and took charge of establishing the facility, but the decisive impetus was Rong Jinzhen’s graduation thesis: it persuaded Young Lillie that an ambitious scientific project might still be possible, and that Rong Jinzhen was the person who could make it worth attempting.

The thesis behind the project

The immediate background was Rong Jinzhen’s thesis, titled The Constant π as a Definable yet Irrational Number. The subject reached well beyond the material he had studied in class and was more like an MA-level problem. Its starting point was a daring hypothesis about π, which Rong Jinzhen used to develop Georg Weinacht’s binary theory into a mathematical approach to a problem in artificial intelligence. The argument’s ambition was striking, although its foundations remained uncertain: its proofs depended on treating π as a constant, a premise the thesis had not itself established.

Young Lillie backed the project despite the political sensitivity surrounding Weinacht’s theories. In communist countries led by the Soviet Union, those theories were rejected or criticized; pursuing them could therefore carry dangerous political implications. Rather than encourage Rong Jinzhen to change subjects, Young Lillie became his thesis supervisor and supported him. His later account of the work distinguishes that support from authorship: apart from recommending a couple of reference books and writing the introduction, Young Lillie said he did not contribute to the thesis’s contents.

The first draft ran to 20,000 characters. Young Lillie found its reasoning incisive but some proofs unnecessarily elaborate, and revised them for clarity and economy. After a couple of revisions, the final version was just over 10,000 characters. Its publication in Popular Mathematics made a considerable impression in Chinese mathematical circles, but its polished quality also prompted doubts that an undergraduate could have written it alone. In the retrospective account, the thesis thus had two opposing effects: its uncertain premise limited its established mathematical value, while its daring and execution convinced Young Lillie that Rong Jinzhen possessed exceptional ability.

From Beijing to a research unit

Not long after the thesis appeared, Young Lillie left suddenly for Beijing without telling people what he intended to do. About a month later, three decisions from the central authorities made the purpose of the trip clear. Young Lillie was permitted to resign as chancellor; government funding was allocated to establish a computer research unit at N University; and he was made responsible for setting it up. The account presents these decisions as the practical foundation of the initiative: the new unit had official backing, money, and a leader willing to devote himself to the work.

The project also answered to an ambition Young Lillie had nearly set aside. He had once hoped to make a concrete contribution to science, but believed that beginning so late might be impossible. Jan Liseiwicz’s letter helped persuade him, and Rong Jinzhen’s thesis supplied the crucial evidence that the undertaking might succeed. Young Lillie came to see Rong Jinzhen not simply as a talented student but as the necessary partner in an uncertain scientific effort. The unit’s founding therefore joined a government decision to a renewed personal purpose.

Recruitment and controversy

Many people hoped to join the new facility. After interviewing candidates, however, Young Lillie concluded that none matched Rong Jinzhen’s standard. Rong Jinzhen became its first recruit and, according to the account, the only person capable of carrying out the central work. The other people hired served largely as assistants, helping with day-to-day tasks. That arrangement generated gossip: observers could regard the internationally ambitious research unit as effectively monopolized by the Rong family.

The criticism carried particular force because it clashed with Young Lillie’s established conduct as a university official. He had made a point of avoiding appointments that could benefit his relatives, even when they were qualified. He rejected repeated recommendations to promote Master Rong, and directed his brother, a returning physics PhD, to seek work elsewhere; the brother first took a position at Normal University and moved to a university in Shanghai the following year. Young Lillie’s wife was angry, interpreting his decisions as a deliberate effort to divide the family. Against that history, recruiting Rong Jinzhen appeared to be a conspicuous exception rather than a continuation of routine family patronage.

A change in principle and purpose

Young Lillie explained the exception through the project itself. Jan Liseiwicz’s letter had influenced him, but seeing Rong Jinzhen’s thesis was what finally gave him confidence to proceed. Without Rong Jinzhen, he believed, the undertaking had little chance; with him, what the team might achieve was open. The appointment was therefore not presented as a reward for kinship but as a judgment about the particular scientific work and the person Young Lillie believed could advance it. That rationale did not prevent gossip, but it explains why he accepted the reputational cost of appearing to abandon his rule.

The change reached beyond university hiring. In his last years, Young Lillie returned to the scientific hopes of his youth and treated the new facility as a chance to contribute to the field, even at the expense of the importance he had formerly assigned to his public career. Master Rong’s recollection gives Rong Jinzhen’s thesis a consequence it had not brought its author directly: it did not change Rong Jinzhen’s life in itself, but it redirected Young Lillie’s final years and altered his faith in what people could accomplish. The unit’s founding thus marks the conversion of one student’s disputed mathematical argument into an institutional undertaking—and of an official’s neglected ambition into renewed work.