Chern

Shiing-shen Chern

Born: 26 Oct 1911 in Chia-hsing (or Jiaxing), Chekiang province (now Zhejiang), China
Died: 

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Chern studied at Nankai University in Tientsin, China, Tsing Hua University, Peking, then studied for his doctorate at Hamburg. In 1937 he became professor of mathematics at Tsing Hua University. After spending 1943-1945 at Princeton, he returned to China to the Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica in Nanking.

From 1949 Chern worked in the USA, at Chicago until 1960 when he went to the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983/84.

His area of research was differential geometry where he studied the (now named) Chern characteristic classes in fibre spaces. These are important not only in mathematics but also in mathematical physics.

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. R O Wells, Chern Retires from Berkeley, Almost!, Mathematical Intelligencer 2 (1980), 78-81.
  3. Shing-Tung Yau, Chern, a great geometer of the twentieth century (Hong Kong, 1992).
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JOC/EFR February 1996