AS if being a mathematics master wasn't enough, our reporter Xu Wenwen meets Cai Tianxin, the amazing Hangzhou resident who can also put talented poet, accomplished author and seasoned globetrotter on the list of terms used to describe himself.

Cai Tianxin is a mathematician, but he is also a poet, a writer who has published more than 20 books and a traveler who has visited more than 90 countries and regions.

Many masters boast more than one title, such as Da Vinci, Pythagoras and Omar Khayyam, whose names are always followed by a string of designations. And Cai's prominent tags are mathematician and poet.

The 48-year-old professor, born in Huangyan, a small town in Zhejiang Province, now resides in Hangzhou, and is the supervisor of PhD students at the prestigious Zhejiang University, whose main emphasis is on the study of number theory. Meanwhile, he's an international poet whose works have been translated into more than 20 languages, including English, Spanish, South Korea and French. He also translated English and Spanish poems into Chinese and got them published.

How could a mathematician who are stereotyped as precise people enjoy such a poetic life? Let's first look at Cai's life in numbers.

Born in 1963, Cai went to college when he was only 15, became a PhD at 24 and a professor at 31, and has published 40-plus math theses in international journals. At 29, Cai released his first collection of poems, and so far has published more than 20 books, including collections of poems, collections of prose, and translations of foreign poems. Currently, he has travelled to 94 countries and regions, and held six solo photography exhibitions.

Every year he spends a couple of months giving lectures, attending math and poetry conferences worldwide, which allows him free travel and time for writing poetry, photography and learning local languages.

Generally speaking, math and poetry are almost two opposite subjects, and Cai admits the two are very different. In his book "Numbers and Roses," he writes: "the job of mathematicians is to discover, while the job of poets is to create … mathematicians wield abstract thinking, while poets wield imaginal thinking."

However, Cai also says "in the limited time and space, to discover approximation is to create," while "math and poetry are both outcomes of imagination." Therefore, the genius combines the two sorts of imagination together, sparking wonderful ideas in his poetry as well as his study of science.

From a math perspective, Cai's poems are commonly believed as "balanced," "moderate" and "succinct." And in some poems, elements of mathematics can be seen, for example, his poem "Division:"

Moonlight divided the tops of buildings

into the shapes of triangles

the shapes of circles and arcs

divides the branches and leaves of plane trees

into the shapes of birds

the shapes of feathers

the boundless sea is also divided

as are our fragile souls

but who has ever seen them?

The poem, like most of his others, is appropriately cinematic in scope, which is characteristic of Cai, influenced not by science, but art and music.

Like many litterateurs, Cai loves art. But to someone who grew up in the age of the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), art was not available to him during his childhood.

The first time Cai heard Western classical music was at the beginning of the 1980s when he was already a master of math. Via a radio, he got chances to listen to pieces by Bach, Chopin and Camille Saint-Sa?ns, and was surprisingly aware that "in the world there were such fabulous things except math," he recalls.

In the succeeding years, Western paintings interested him. In the age when China had no exhibitions, he immersed himself in libraries and bookstores for looking at albums of paintings. Through surrealist works by painters such as Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, he noticed "art could break reality as such."

The young mathematician soon became a huge fan of art. Although he has never learned a musical instrument or studied painting, Cai integrates the appeal of music flow, the ideology of surrealism and the imagination of paintings into his poems, making them as picturesque as paintings and as harmonious as music, which also facilitates the translation of his poems.

Naturally, the mathematician/literator makes comparative studies between the two subjects. Since 2003, he has written three books about math and literature - "Numbers and Roses," "Mathematics and Civilizations" and "Incomparable Figures - Selected Essays about Mathematics Starts."

"I am one of the few people who studies the comparison between the two subjects," he says. "In mathematics which has hundreds of branches, mathematicians ignore each other, let alone their communication with literati."

"But I hope my study can make math a culture accessible to the masses," he adds.

In his books, there are few formulas or theorem, but there are understandable, inspiring comparative studies between science and humanities.

Cai's understanding of art also influences his photography, and the art fan has held six solo exhibitions of photography (five of them are a visiting exhibition that displays the same photos). Even though all his photos were shot with a simple camera, the social values behind the images support the artistic value of his photos, in which critics have described "the composition and color are like that of oil paintings."

Cai only started taking photos after he became a traveler. Although he did not go abroad until he was 30, his ambition to travel the world was initiated when he was very young.

Cai emphasizes his first map more than his first poem or first photo, which was drawn by him in 1972 when Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, visited China and opened diplomatic relations between the two nations.

Strictly speaking, it was a travel route chart, on which the little Cai who had only been previously to Wenzhou, a city near his hometown, depicted the line of Nixon's travel, from the United States to China's cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou.

Without any adult help, he referred to a world map to shape the line, and without any crayon or color pen, he did it with a black pen. The result shows clearly a boy's ambition to travel the world.

"I believe the drawing of the map was magic, of which the meaning is no less than that of my first poem, and the latter experience has been shared by many," he says in his autobiography "Little Memories."

From then on, he kept drawing maps of his own travels - from Asia to America, Australia and Europe - not a single travel has been missed.

"Drawing a map is my favorite, and even became one reason why I love travelling," says Cai.

Seemingly, mathematician, poet, writer and traveler Cai's life is stuffed with too many items, but Cai would love to concentrate on poetry and travel after retirement.