Shiing-Shen Chern
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"Chern" redirects here. For other uses, see Chern (disambiguation).
| Shiing-Shen Chern | |
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| Chinese name | |
| Simplified: | 陈省身 |
| Traditional: | 陳省身 |
| Hanyu Pinyin: | Chén Xǐngshēn |
| Gwoyeu Romatzyh: | Chern Shiing-Shen |
Shiing-Shen Chern (October 26, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese American mathematician, one of the leading differential geometers of the twentieth century.
His last name is pronounced "Chen", a common Chinese surname; the spelling "Chern" is the transliteration in the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization, with the silent "r" indicating a second-tone syllable in Mandarin Chinese, which is a tonal language.
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[edit] Early life
Chern was born in Jiaxing in Zhejiang province. He moved to Tianjin in 1922 to be with his father, and starting in 1926 he studied there at Nankai University, graduating in mathematics in 1930. He was a graduate student under Dan Sun at Tsinghua University from 1931 to 1934, working on projective differential geometry.
[edit] European studies
In 1932 Wilhelm Blaschke from the University of Hamburg visited Tsinghua and was impressed with Chern. In 1934 Chern went on a scholarship to Hamburg, working on the Cartan-Kähler theory, and finishing his doctoral degree in 1936. In 1936–1937 he studied with Élie Cartan in Paris, returning to Beijing, China to a professorial position in Tsinghua (which had relocated to Kunming after the Japanese attacks).
[edit] In America and after
In 1943 Chern went to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, working there on characteristic classes in differential geometry. Shortly afterwards, he was invited by Solomon Lefschetz to be an editor of Annals of Mathematics.
He returned to Shanghai in 1946 to found the Mathematical Institute of Academia Sinica, which was later moved to Nanking. From 1948 he was again at the IAS, becoming a professor at the University of Chicago in 1949.
He moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. The next year he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. At Berkeley, he founded the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in 1981 and acted as the director until 1984. In 1985 he founded the Nankai Insititute of Mathematics in Tianjin, where he died in 2004 at the age of 93.
[edit] Research
Chern's work spreads over all the classic fields of differential geometry. It includes areas currently fashionable (the Chern-Simons theory arising from a 1974 paper written jointly with Jim Simons), perennial (the Chern-Weil theory linking curvature invariants to characteristic classes from 1944, after the Allendoerfer-Weil paper of 1943 on the Gauss-Bonnet theorem), the quotidian (Chern classes), and some areas such as projective differential geometry and webs that have a lower profile. He published results in integral geometry, value distribution theory of holomorphic functions, and minimal submanifolds.
He was a true follower of Élie Cartan, working intensely on the 'theory of equivalence' in his time in China from 1937 to 1943, in relative isolation. In 1954 he published his own treatment of the pseudogroup problem that is in effect the touchstone of Cartan's geometric theory. He used the moving frame method with success only matched by its inventor; he preferred in complex manifold theory to stay with the geometry, rather than follow the potential theory. Indeed, one of his books is entitled, "Complex Manifolds without Potential Theory"! In the last years of his life, he advocated the study of Finsler geometry, writing several books and articles on the subject.
[edit] Awards and recognition
He was awarded a National Medal of Science in 1975; a Wolf Prize in mathematics in 1984; and a Shaw Prize in mathematical sciences in May, 2004. The asteroid 29552 Chern is named after him.
[edit] Family
His wife, Shih-ning (Cheng) Chern, whom he married in Kunming in 1939, died in 2000. They had a daughter, May Chu (wife of the physicist Paul Chu) and a son, Paul.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- UC Berkeley obituary
- 1998 interview in Notices of the American Mathematical Society
- Shiing-Shen Chern at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Shiing-Shen Chern". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
- Chern's Work in Geometry by Shing-Tung Yau
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Astronomy 2004: Peebles 2005: Marcy, Mayor 2006: Perlmutter, Riess, Schmidt |
Categories: 1911 births | 2004 deaths | 20th century mathematicians | 21st century mathematicians | American mathematicians | Chinese mathematicians | Chinese Americans | Differential geometers | Naturalized citizens of the United States | National Medal of Science recipients | Princeton University faculty | University of California, Berkeley faculty | Inductees of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit | Wolf Prize recipients
