Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU), formerly the “Imperial Chinese Railway College at Shanhaiguan by Beiyang Railway Bureau”, was founded in 1896. Known as “the Cornell of the East”, SWJTU is one of the oldest national universities in China. The university is on the list of China’s first batch of “211 Project”, “985 Project Innovation Platform” and “2011 Plan” universities, and it is a key university with a government ratified graduate school under the direct administration of the Ministry of Education. So far the university has set up the plan of “perfection in engineering, revitalization in science, prosperity in liberal arts, leap in life science”, and proposed a goal of building a “tier one comprehensive research university with distinct characteristics in rail transportation”.

The history of teaching math in SWJTU dates back to 1896 and is in step with the development of the university. The predecessor of the School of Mathematics is the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Tangshan Institute of Railway, which was founded in 1958. In the last century, many renowned mathematicians including Shouheng HUANG, Kezhan GUO, Rongbao YANG and Keou HUANG taught at the School of Mathematics. Generations of mathematicians have made a great contribution to the formation of the university spirit “cultivating talents for the rejuvenation of Chinese nation, persevering in the betterment of individual merits” and the tradition of “rigorous scholarship, strict requirements”. The first batch of undergraduates majoring in mathematics graduated in 1960, among which there is Zhenting HOU, a renowned mathematician who won the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1978.（As an outstanding representative of mathematics graduates from the class of 1960 professor Hou Zhenting, won the international Davidson prize for mathematics and the thirteenth "Hua Luogeng prize for mathematics"） The educational achievement in mathematics at SWJTU was highly praised By Loo-keng Hua, the former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), during his visit to the university in November 1978. In 1982, SWJTU became one of the first batchs of national universities of engineering that were eligible to issue master degree in pure mathematics. The university then established the Department of Mathematics in 1985, and later in 2008, the School of Mathematics was formally established.