he read a popular science book on mathematical problems written by Chinese mathematician Sun Zeying (, published under the name J. Tseying Sun) called Shuxue Fangfa Qu Yin () and was fascinated by the Kirkman's schoolgirl problem. He devoted himself into solving the generalized version of the problem, studying relevant areas in mathematics on his own and spending a lot of time on research. In December 1961, he wrote up a paper on its solution and another paper on Latin squares and sent them to Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The reply letter came in February 1963, in which they did not directly comment on the papers but suggested that he check them himself and send them to journals if the results were new, and they included some references on latest developments. He revised his paper on the generalized Kirkman's schoolgirl problem and submitted it to Shuxue Tongbao () in March 1963. His paper was too long and technical for the journal which aimed at middle school teachers, however, it took the journal one year to reply to him that he should submit it elsewhere. After further revisions, he submitted the paper to Acta Mathematica Sinica on March 14, 1965. On February 7, 1966, he received the rejection letter from the journal criticizing it as "basically not really new results, worthless". It was realized after his death that this rejection was a serious mistake. In 1966, he sent two other papers to journals with no response, since with the start of the Cultural Revolution all academic activities were disrupted. He was discouraged by the rejections and wrote in his diary that he "had since then given up the thought of submitting papers". After the Cultural Revolution, he resubmitted some revised papers, but they were not accepted. In April 1979, in some journal issues of 1974 and 1975 that he managed to borrow from Beijing, he unexpectedly learned from a paper of Haim Hanani that the problem which he solved in his 1965 paper had been solved and first published in 1971 by Ray-Chaudhuri and R. M. Wilson, which was a big blow to him. He went on to tackle the problem of large sets of disjoint Steiner triple systems. Zhu Lie (), a professor of mathematics at Soochow University working also in combinatorial mathematics, realized the importance of his work and suggested that he submit it