In Memory of Shiing-Shen Chern
Professor SS Chern died of heart failure following a heart attack on December 3. He was 93 years old.
Born in 1911, the year the nationalist revolution expelled the foreign Manchu (Ching) dynasty from China, he seemed destined to revolutionize the academic world in China and beyond in his own way.
For he trumpeted the importance of geometry relentlessly and made the world acknowledge it, thus turning the field which was at its low point into a vibrant area of study. Till these days, global differential geometry and complex algebraic geometry - fields which he had had the greatest impact - are fundamental to many areas of mathematics and theoretical physics.
At a tender age of fifteen, Chern started his undergraduate studies at Nankai University. While initially interested in Physics, he found himself clumsy with experimental work and thus settled for Mathematics as a major eventually. In 1930, he became the only graduate student in Mathematics to enter the university. During his four years there, he not only studied widely in projective differential geometry but also began to publish his own papers on the topic. He subsequently decided to pursue his interest at the University of Hamburg and was awarded his doctor of sciences degree in 1936.
In the years that followed, he shuttled from Hamburg to Paris and then China before he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1943 to 1945. In 1946 he returned to China to become the acting director of the Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica in Nanking.
In 1949, Chern went back to the United States and taught at the University of Chicago until 1960, when he was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. The following year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Chern was a member of the American Mathematical Society and served as vice president from 1963 to 1964. He was also elected to both the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983 and 1984 respectively. He founded and was the director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, between 1981 and 1984. He also founded and was the director of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics in Tianjin, China, from 1985.
Professor Chern had published the following books with World Scientific:
He had also contributed regularly to our physics and mathematical journals and inspired many other publications in honor of him and his works.
We dedicate this article to Professor Chern, in memory.
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