Recently, Associate Professor Yang Liping of the Algebra and Number Theory Research Group at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Chengdu University of Technology (CDUT), published an important research paper titled “Unit roots of the unit root L-functions” in the prestigious international mathematics journal Mathematische Annalen. The work was completed in collaboration with Associate Professor Zhang Hao of Southeast University, with CDUT as the primary contributing institution.

Focusing on the unit root L-functions of an arbitrary family of Laurent polynomials, this study provides a p-adic hypergeometric function expression for their unit roots. This completely resolves the conjecture proposed by Professor C. Douglas Haessig of the University of Arizona and Professor Steven Sperber of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, which posited that “the unit root L-functions of any Laurent polynomial family have hypergeometric function representations.”

Author profile: Yang Liping holds a PhD and completed postdoctoral research before becoming an Associate Professor. She obtained her doctoral degree from the School of Mathematics at Sichuan University (2016–2019) and was a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities from 2017 to 2018 under a government-sponsored program. From 2020 to 2022, she conducted postdoctoral research at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Capital Normal University. Her research focuses on algebraic number theory, with major interests including exponential sums over finite fields and Dwork theory. She has led several research projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China Young Scientists Fund, the Sichuan Provincial Youth Science Fund, and the Beijing Postdoctoral Research Foundation. As first or corresponding author, she has published more than ten SCI papers in leading international journals such as Mathematische Annalen, Journal of Number Theory, Forum Mathematicum, and Finite Fields and Their Applications.