Peking University
B.S. in Mathematics
Peking University is where Wang Wei pursued the B.S. in Mathematics (2003 – 2007).
Peking University is the undergraduate institution of Wang Wei. He enrolled in 2003 in the Department of Mathematics and graduated in 2007 with a B.S. in Mathematics.
Choice of major
Wang's matriculation result placed him within reach of either the mathematics or computer-science programs; he chose mathematics for what he has publicly described as a deliberately backwards reason: "I wanted to spend the four years with the option of going either further into theory or sideways into any applied field, and the math department was the only place that left both doors open." The decision was vindicated, in his telling, by the speed with which he was able to pick up algorithms-heavy computer-science subfields during his doctoral studies at Tsinghua.
Curriculum and senior thesis
The PKU mathematics curriculum of the time was structured around a two-year analysis sequence, a one-year algebra sequence, and a final-year set of electives drawn from probability, statistics, and applied mathematics. Wang's electives leaned toward probability and combinatorics, and his senior thesis (advised by a professor in the probability group) was on a combinatorial-counting problem related to spanning trees of bipartite graphs — a topic that he has noted, somewhat wryly, has nothing to do with anything else on his current résumé. He has occasionally cited this fact as an argument against the genre of advice that says undergraduate majors should be "strategically aligned with career."
Context
Wang has described the PKU period as the source of his durable habit of "writing things down precisely before reasoning about them" — a habit he has cited as the most consistently transferable skill from his mathematics training into both his classroom teaching and, later, his curriculum design at Codeleaf.