In March 1979, the CAS founded "the Promotion Office of Studies in Applied Mathematics at CAS" with the approval of the State Council. In order to make the researchers work better and more enthusiastically and to promote the development of mathematics and edge sciences, with the approval of the State Council and based on the Promotion Office of Applied Mathematics the CAS founded the Institute of Applied Mathematics in October 1979. The first Director of institute is the world-famous mathematician, professor Hua Loo-keng.

For many years, guided by the spirit of diligence, preciseness and innovation, the researchers of the institute have made a lot of achievements. In particular, since the reform and opening-up period, the institute has produced very nice work in both the basic research and applied fields. For example, research on "Dirichlet forms and Markov processes" has made a great breakthrough, which fully successfully resolved a difficult problem in the field that has existed for almost twenty years. From these results a new mathematical framework-quasi-regular Dirichlet forms-was created, which established a one to one corresponding relationship between the Dirichlet forms and the Markov processes. This has made the theory of Dirichlet forms become a new branch of mathematics which combines analysis and probability in a natural way. "The proof of the Steiner ratio Conjecture" was appraised as one of the ten national technology achievements in 1992. This conjecture is a long-standing mathematical question with an applied background which has been studied for a long time in the Bell Laboratory in USA. Research on "characteristic evaluation of oil and gas resources by unstable well-testing method", which made use of porous flow mechanics, differential equations, error analysis, approximation computation and nonlinear programming, has obtained efficient computation methods. This result has been successfully applied to the four large oil fields including the Tabei oil field in Xinjiang. "The equal design method" has been applied to military engineering, medicine, chemistry, textile, metallurgy, and electron industries with fruitful achievements and huge economic and social benefits. Research on "Evaluation System of national economic information system Investment Projects" proposed an investment forecast model based on operations research, provided with algorithms and for the model used the model to give analysis and appraise for the investment forecast and decision-making problems of non-profitable organizations. This work was awarded the first prize of the OR in progressive award by the International Federation of Operations Societies (IFORS) at the 14th International Conference.

Since its foundation, the Institute of Applied Mathematics has obtained 5awards at international level, 8 awards at national level, including 1 first class awards, 3 second class awards and 2 third class awards, 56 awards at CAS and ministerial level, including 9 first class awards, 17 second class awards, 30 third class awards and 25 other awards.