International Congress on Basic Science Opens in Beijing

July 16—The Third International Congress on Basic Science opened in Beijing on July 14. The Congress, established in 2023, again gathered nearly 1,000 experts, scholars, and students who will engage in deep discussions over the coming two weeks on cutting-edge progress in mathematics, physics, and information science and engineering.

Four Fields medalists, three Nobel laureates, and two Turing Award winners, including Shing-Tung Yau, the founder of the Congress, and Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, attended. Six preeminent scientists—Samuel C. C. Ting, Steven Chu, David Gross, Robert Tarjan, Shigefumi Mori and George Lusztig—were honored with the 2025 Basic Science Lifetime Award, the highest distinction in fundamental science, celebrating a scientist’s enduring impact on the field.

This year’s congress will host more than 500 academic sessions including plenary talks, basic science lectures and satellite conferences. Leading international scientists will deliver keynote lectures on basic and frontier sciences, sharing the latest breakthroughs and promoting interdisciplinary innovation.

The initiative for holding the conference was based on the understanding that basic science, often unconnected to practical applications, was critical in moving science forward, and that holding an annual conference on the topic would help to spread an understanding of what is being accomplished in this field. This reflects entirely different thinking than in the West, and especially in the United States, where the U.S. government has been defunding support for basic sciences, and focusing more an applications, such as Artificial Intelligence.