November 7, 2023
When Shawnee State University Mathematics Professor Emeritus Dr. Jinlu Li gave a presentation to an international academic audience in India in September, he had the support and confidence of his peers in the SSU Math Department.
“I had rehearsed the presentation with the department here first,” he said. “It was most beneficial, to be able to practice with them, to take questions and comments from my colleagues here.”
Dr. Li presented a discussion on “Directional Differentiability of the Metric Projection in Banach Spaces and Applications to Optimization Theory.” After rehearsing with his SSU colleagues, he presented the same topic during the G20 Themed International Conference on Variational Analysis and Optimization with Applications at Aligarh Muslim University in the city of Aligarh Sept. 23-25.
Dr. Li’s subject involves projecting a connection from a point outside a defined vector space into a point inside that space and determining all the possible connections. The subject is complex, but Dr. Li says the concepts can be helpful in process improvement for many fields, such as transportation and logistics. He began working on the current presentation topic in February 2023. He presented discussions about it four times during the summer while on a visit to China.
Dr. Li’s article on the same subject was just accepted for publication in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, an extremely noteworthy achievement in mathematics research.
As Professor Emeritus in the SSU Mathematics Department, Dr. Li is officially retired but devotes countless hours now to detailed research in his field. He has authored no fewer than 10 scholarly published papers in 2023 alone, an incredible feat for any scholar in a single year. He has been invited to present at numerous academic conferences globally.
“Shawnee State has been so very kind and supportive of me and my work,” he said. He began teaching at SSU in 1989 and retired in 2021 to devote his time to research. He continues to support the faculty in the Mathematics Department in the SSU College of Arts & Sciences.
A native of China, Dr. Li began teaching as a high school instructor in a small village before becoming a student at Beijing University. From there he traveled to the U.S. where he earned his doctorate in 1988. He came to SSU from Michigan and found the smaller, quieter community in southern Ohio a comfortable environment as a teacher and researcher.
To learn more about Mathematical Sciences at Shawnee State University, visit shawnee.edu/math.