The Department of Mathematics can be traced back to 1921. The famous mathematician Qinglai Xiong set up the Department of Mathematics at Southeast University when he came back from Europe in the fall 1921. After the adjustment of university of China in 1952, Nanjing Institute of Technology combined all the basic subjects into the Basic Science Department. In 1984,the Mathematics and Mechanics Department was founded, and in 2002 the department renewed the Department of Mathematics.

The department has made a tremendous progress in the last two decades. Since the entrance examination was renewed in 1977, the department began to recruit undergraduate. When the batch of students graduated in 1982, it started to recruit graduate. During this period, the department gradually set up a group of teachers with reasonable age structure and high educational level structure by vigorously introduced and trained persons with ability. Now there are 73 teachers in service, including 20 professors, 29 associate professors. Particularly, there are 53 teachers younger than 45-year-old, account for 72.6 percent of all teachers, which shows vital force of the teachers group.

In 1986, our department acquired the masters' degree awarding power of "Applied mathematics" under the permission of the degree committee of state department. Later in 1990, in 1995 and in 1998, the department successively acquired respectively the masters' degree awarding power of "Probability theory and statistics", "Operational research and control theory" and "Pure mathematics", etc. Furthermore, it acquired the doctor's degree awarding power of "Applied mathematics" in 2000. Now it has two undergraduate specialties: "Mathematics and applied mathematics" and "Information and computing science". It recruits about 100 undergraduates, approximate 50 graduates and about 5 doctor graduates every year. There are more than 500 undergraduates and junior college students (Junior college belongs to series of adult education.)and about 100 master graduates and about 10 doctorial graduates.