Wei Cheng
Names: Wei ChengWei
First appears in Book 1: The Three-Body Problem, chapter 6 (6)
Appearances
What you know
Book 1: The Three-Body Problem
- Ch 6Wei Cheng, Shen's husband, stays home and seems to research something on a very expensive HP workstation in his upstairs room.
- Ch 16Wei Cheng is a mathematical prodigy who won first place at the International Mathematics Olympiad but was lazy and unmotivated, and was later fired as a college lecturer.
- Ch 16Wei Cheng perceives numbers as three-dimensional shapes and geometric figures as numbers; he often guesses correct answers without showing derivations.
- Ch 16Wei Cheng reports that a caller threatened to kill him if he did not stop his research, and that he woke to find Shen Yufei touching his face at night.
- Ch 16At a mountain temple, Wei Cheng imagined one, two, then three spheres in empty space and became obsessed with the three-body problem.
- Ch 16Wei Cheng developed an evolutionary algorithm that has found over a hundred stable three-body configurations, versus three or four found by others.
- Ch 16Wei Cheng stays calm at Shen's death, urges Wang to stay away from the matter, believing the world is about to change and nothing matters.
- Ch 16Wei gives Wang a CD with his three-body evolutionary algorithm model and asks him to publish it under Wang's own name.
- Ch 21Wei Cheng is a math prodigy whose complete solution to the three-body problem could ruin Trisolaris's plans, so the ETO ordered him killed.
- Ch 29Wei Cheng, a prodigy unconnected to the ETO, accidentally made a three-body breakthrough in which the Redemptionists placed much hope.
Connections
- family ofShen Yufeihusband and wife
- related toWang MiaoUses Wei Cheng's mathematical model
Key moments
- Book 1 · Ch 6Shen tells Wang to stop his research
Wang visits Shen, who is playing 3body.net. She evades his questions and only insists he stop his nanomaterial project.
- Book 1 · Ch 16Wei Cheng reports a death threat
At Da Shi's office, Wei Cheng tells his life story and reports an anonymous call threatening death unless he stops his three-body research, plus a frightening nighttime encounter with Shen Yufei.
- Book 1 · Ch 16Shen Yufei recruits Wei Cheng
Shen Yufei finds Wei Cheng at a temple, recognises his three-body work, and takes him away with promises of computing resources; the abbot warns against it.
- Book 1 · Ch 16Search and discovery of Shen's body
Da Shi's team goes to Wei's home to search for a gun and arrives as shots have just been fired. They find Shen shot dead; the gunman escapes in a black Santana.
- Book 1 · Ch 16Wei reveals the argument with Pan Han
Wei tells police that Shen and Pan Han argued in Chinese about the Lord, the commander, and the Adventists and Redemptionists, with Pan threatening to stop her.
- Book 1 · Ch 16Wei gives Wang the algorithm
Wei hands Wang a CD of his three-body evolutionary algorithm and advises him to stay out of things.