(XINHUA)

Liu Lu, a senior undergraduate at Central South University in central China's Hunan Province, was hired as a professor-level researcher by the university in March for his talent in mathematics.

Liu, 22, became the youngest of his kind and was awarded 1 million yuan ($158,900) by his university to upgrade his experimental facilities and improve his living conditions. The university has also given him special approval for successive postgraduate and doctoral programs of study to help him make greater contributions to science.

In 2010, Liu won international acclaim by solving a problem of reverse mathematics, namely the Seetapun Enigma, a conjecture put forward by English logician David Seetapun in the 1990s concerning the Ramsey Theorem of Pairs.

During the past two decades, countless mathematicians have made efforts to solve the problem but without any results. Liu solved the open question and provided a negative answer to Seetapun's conjecture.

Liu first knew about this conjecture in August 2010. After reading many papers on the issue, he was suddenly struck with an idea that could solve the problem. He finished a paper in a night and sent it to the Journal of Symbolic Logic , an internationally prestigious academic journal on mathematical logic, using his pen name Liu Jiayi.