Career
Currently he works as a professor in Nanjing University. In 2003, he presented a unified approach to three famous topics of Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory: covering systems, restricted sumsets, and zero-sum problems or EGZ Theorem. He used q-series to prove that any natural number can be represented as a sum of an even square and two triangular numbers.
He conjectured, and proved with B.-K. Oh, that each positive integer can be represented as a sum of a square, an odd square and a triangular number. In 2009, he conjectured that any natural number can be written as the sum of two squares and a pentagonal number, as the sum of a triangular number, an even square and a pentagonal number, and as the sum of a square, a pentagonal number and a hexagonal number. He also raised many open conjectures on congruences and posed over 100 conjectural series for powers of.
In 2013 he published a paper containing many conjectures on primes one of which states that for any positive integer there are consecutive primes not exceeding such that , where denotes the -th prime. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory.
