of the National Ministry of Higher Education & the Dalian Institute of Technology. He was then transferred to research in the Department of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. United States In 1996, Liu received a master's degree in computer science from Columbia University. He was invited to speak at the New York Academy of Sciences. Liu gained employment as a member of technical staff (MTS) at the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There he worked on Optical telecommunication network design and planning, routing algorithms, optimization techniques, and economic models and strategy analysis. Liu's areas of research included: SPIDER, a design tool for fast-restoration in all-optical networks; VPNStar, a system for provisioning multi-service VPNs with Quality of service guarantees over Internet Protocol; in software design, a management system for Lambda Router in all-optical networks; and analysis of Internet pricing. During his days at Bell Laboratories, Liu introduced the A*Prune (1999, ) with K. G. Ramakrishnan, to describe a new class of Algorithm. This opened a new research direction in theoretical science. He found that A*Prune is comparable to the current best known-approximate algorithms for most randomly generated graphs. The algorithm constructs paths, starting at the source and going towards the destination. But, at each iteration, the algorithm is rid of all paths that are guaranteed to violate the constraints, thereby keeping only those partial paths that have the potential to be turned into feasible paths, from which the optimal paths are drawn. Liu also proposed a special class of Optical devices called SPIDER (2001, ); optical routers, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems, and cross-connects of unprecedented capacities. Liu and his colleagues are developing techniques for efficient and reliable optical network design, covering decentralized dedicated protection to shared path-based mesh restoration. Since 2011, Liu had been involved in a bitter divorce with his former wife, the judge presided the case had declared him mentally unstable, and appointed a custodian guardian to represent him against his wish; among Liu's accusations: his wife was a spy sent by Chinese Communist central committee to monitor him, and his ex-employer Morgan Stanley fired him to appease the Chinese government. References External links Quatratic.com — A website solver for Convex Nonlinear Programming 1961 births Living people Mathematicians from Jilin Chinese revolutionaries 21st-century American physicists American financiers Number theorists Theoretical physicists Scientists at Bell Labs