The purposes of the construction of this laboratory are,in response to the needs of the national and local social and economic development,toprovide support for other disciplinessuch as mechanics, physics, atmospheric science, resource and environmental sciences, life science, statistics, and finance etc. in Gansu Province, and to provide thenecessary theoretical foundation of mathematicsfor national and local economic construction, and, at the same time, to provide a good training platform for mathematical application talents that are urgently needed for social development. Through three to five years of construction, the laboratory will strive to become a team with distinctive research direction and high-level research members with multidisciplinary combination. It will make some symbolic achievements, so that the research level of applied mathematics in Lanzhou University in the overall catch up with the international advanced level.

The school of mathematics and statistics has paid great attention to the application background of mathematics for a quite long time and developed some distinctive research fields. The establishment and running open of the applied mathematics and complex system laboratory has effectively integrated the research resources, improved the research capability of researchers, increased the international influence of the department and attracted more scholars to join in. As a excellent research platform, the laboratory effectively improves the growth of young scholars and becomes a training base for talented young scholars. Via the construction of the laboratory, the excellent scholars can be agglomerated for obtaining original research results which have international influence , in order to form several internationally competitive research directions.

The laboratory has four research directions: applied mathematical models and analysis, discrete mathematics and network, scientific computing and image processing, statistical models and data analysis. The target of the laboratory is to build a research center of applied mathematics with a certain international influence, effectively promoting the development of mathematics and applied disciplines, and eventually become a high-level platform which may undertake major projects of the national research. The construction of the laboratory will provide a strong support for the development of mathematics and related disciplines in Lanzhou university and even in western China, contributing to the development of science, technology and economy in Gansu province.