Hi, I'm Anna Xiang. I haven't decided whether this website will be formal or not (depending on who I show it to), so for the about page I decided to replicate my father's personal website, which was made more than 20 years ago.
I am pleased by the fact that my last name starts with X, and although my father said exactly the same thing on his website, this is my original thought. It makes me feel like an unknown variable. As for my English name, my parents were about to name me Athena when I was three, but I told them I would not be able to spell it. So I named myself Anna (well, partly or mostly because of the movie Frozen I.) Additionally, Ryuichi Sakamoto has written a song named Anna before, so what can I complain about this name then? Forgot to mention, the name day for Anna in Hungary is 7/26, pretty close to my birthday (7/30). What a coincidence, but still very explainable; I mean, there are only 366 days possible to be born.
I was born in Ruian, Zhejiang province, and I am quite proud of the fact that I can understand and speak (to some extent) the dialect there, as it is considered one of the hardest dialects in China. If only I had infinite time and enough money, I might really study linguistics and try to preserve this dialect (people say it's on the edge of extinction). Perhaps the former prerequisite is not even vital, though the latter is. Of course, time for humans is limited, and all languages will die out one day, and perhaps for this reason I may not call people's efforts of this sort resisting its death. Otherwise, in writing this website, I am also resisting the death of HTML.
Mentioning linguistics, I'd like to share a fun fact. I am now going to show you one of my achievements in academics, and it is historically important, it is national, it might not have been achieved before, ever, it is important - but only if you give its attributives some attention. I (might) have got the historical highest score in Hungarian linguistics Olympiad's semfinal considering the set of the students who attended the competition without knowing the working language (for me, it was Hungarian.) 9.58 out of 80! For your reference, the entry point threshold was 38.
If someone urges me to share some positive side of my academic achievement, I'd like to tell you that Graham Farmelo once replied to my email. In fact, I just got this message as I opened my mailbox to check my score in the semi-final. Some would ask, who is Graham Farmelo? Well, he wrote "The Strangest Man." Some would then ask, who is the strangest man? Paul Dirac is. And he is not only the strangest man but also my favourite physicist.