containing his first three papers, his family and friends reminded him to get some rest, but he said that he could not since he had not much time. To have a better research environment, he tried to get transferred to university with his friends' help since 1978, but he could not find any suitable position after several years of effort. Late recognition and death His Western peers discovered a leader in the field with exceptional achievements, while he still remained largely unknown to the Chinese mathematical community. In the first ever combinatorial mathematics conference in China held in Dalian in July 1983, when two Canadian mathematicians Eric Mendelsohn and John Adrian Bondy, who were the referees of Lu's papers, arrived and asked for Lu Jiaxi, one of the organizers thought they were looking for the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the same sounding name. It was the first time the Chinese combinatorialists got to know him. Upon hearing Lu present his work in a session, Wu Lisheng of Soochow University recommended that he should give a talk on it at the closing ceremony. After his talk, he received a unanimous accolade. In August, he took part in a combinatorics workshop in Hefei as a helper and gave a talk there. Although he had gained recognition from scholars in his field, he was still living in poverty. School leaders did not appreciate his engagement in research, seeing it as a deviation from his work duties. They even assigned him more duties such as timekeeping on sports day to keep him occupied. In a school general meeting, the principal reprimanded him, saying, "We are a middle school. Someone wants to be a scientist, he may as well be transferred to the Academy of Sciences." When he was finally invited to mathematical conferences in China, his middle school refused to support his travel fee, saying that according to the rules allowances were provided only for teaching related activities. He had to borrow from his friends to attend the conferences. The conferences brought him into the mathematical community. He was invited as a speaker to the fourth national conference of the Chinese Mathematical Society in late October. Several universities in China wanted to offer him positions, and he decided to go to South China Normal University. The Canadian mathematicians were planning to invite him for a visit at University of Toronto.