Chern, Shiing-shen

▪ 2005

      Chinese American mathematician (b. Oct. 26, 1911, Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, China—d. Dec. 3, 2004, Tianjin, China), advanced the field of differential geometry with new insights into the curvature of objects. His study of the “characteristic classes” of surfaces had resonance in such disparate fields as physics and computer graphics. Chern was educated in China, Germany, and France and taught in China and the U.S. In 1981 he cofounded the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, where a chair was later endowed in his name. In 1985 he established the Institute for Mathematics at Nankai University, his alma mater in Tianjin. In part through his efforts, by the century's end differential geometry, a field that had languished in the early 20th century, had been elevated to a major discipline in mathematics.

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▪ American mathematician

original name in Chinese (Pinyin)  Chen Xingshen  or  (Wade-Giles)  Ch'en Hsing-shen 

born October 26, 1911, Jiaxing, China

died December 3, 2004, Tianjin

      Chinese American mathematician and educator whose researches in differential geometry developed ideas that now play a major role in mathematics and in mathematical physics.

      Chern graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, in 1930; he received an M.S. degree in 1934 from Tsinghua University in Beijing and a doctor of sciences degree from the University of Hamburg (Germany) in 1936. A year later he returned to Tsinghua as professor of mathematics. Chern was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, from 1943 to 1945. In 1946 he returned to China to become acting director of the Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica in Nanjing.

      Chern returned to the United States in 1949 and taught at the University of Chicago, where he collaborated with André Weil (Weil, André), and later at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1961 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Chern served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society (1963–64) and was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983. He helped found and was the director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley (1981–84) and in 1985 played an important role in the establishment of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics in Tianjin, where he held several posts, including director, until his death.

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