Wei Cheng

Wei Cheng is a supporting character in Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. A mathematician of about forty with a gift for intuitive shortcuts, he lives in comfortable seclusion, supported by his wife Shen Yufei, a physician who hosts gatherings of a group called the Frontiers of Science at their home. Wei Cheng pays little attention to his wife's circle or its concerns. His energy goes instead into a single private obsession: the classical three-body problem of celestial mechanics, the notoriously intractable question of how three bodies orbiting one another move over time. Working alone at a workstation in his study, he pursues an evolutionary algorithm approach to the problem, indifferent to what use anyone else might find for the results.