Zhihong Xia

Zhihong "Jeff" Xia (Chinese: 夏志宏; pinyin: Xià Zhìhóng; born 20 September 1962, in Dongtai, Jiangsu, China) is a Chinese-American mathematician.

Xia received, in 1982, from Nanjing University a bachelor's degree in astronomy and in 1988, a PhD in mathematics from Northwestern University with thesis advisor Donald G. Saari, for his thesis, The Existence of the Non-Collision Singularities.

For selected initial conditions, the fifth mass can be accelerated to an infinite velocity in a finite time interval (without any collision between the bodies involved in the example).

, Painlevé had proven that the singularities (points of the orbit in which accelerations become infinite in a finite time interval) must be of the collision type.

In 1993, Xia was the inaugural winner of the Blumenthal Award of the American Mathematical Society.

In 1995, he received the Monroe H. Martin Prize in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland.