Recently, Professor Jay Steven Siegel, Dean of the Health Science Platform and School of Life Sciences of Tianjin University, gave a lecture entitled Chemistry and Language in the Academic Lecture Hall of the College of Foreign Languages. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Hao Yunzhi, the head of the English Department, and many teachers and students from Nankai University and Tianjin University attended the lecture.
Professor Siegel first introduced the commonalities between the sciences such as chemistry and liberal arts such as language. He said that in chemistry, matter is in static or dynamic state, and some elements react to become another substance and the same is true of the language; Professor Siegel then used the similarities between the structure of the chemical substance and the writing of Chinese character to list many vivid examples and won much applause. After the lecture, under the host of Mr. Hao Yunzhi, Professor Jay and the students had an interactive exchange. The students enthusiastically asked questions and the atmosphere of the lecture reached its climax. Yu Ying from the 2018 English interpreting profession said that this lecture in English had benefited her a lot and the relationship between the chemistry and language discovered by the professor had greatly inspired her academic research.
Professor Jay Steven Siegel is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University. He has won the Outstanding Youth Award of the US President, Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society, the Chinese Government Friendship Award, Person of the Year of Foreign Teachers in China, and the most influential foreign expert of the 40th Anniversary of Reform and Opening-up. He is now Dean of the Health Science Platform and School of Life Sciences of Tianjin University.
