Shiing-Shen Chern

Shiing-shen Chern, original name in ChineseChen Xingshen or Ch’en Hsing-shen (born October26,1911, Jiaxing ,China—died December 3,2004, Tianjin), Chinese American mathematician and educator whose researches indifferential geometry developed ideas that now play a major role in mathematics and in mathematical physics.

Chern entered Nankai University to study Mathematics in Tianjin in 1926, and graduated in 1930; in the summer of 1934, Chern graduated from Tsinghua with an M.S. degree, which is the first master's degree in mathematics awarded in China,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, and later at the University of California in Berkeley. Chern served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society (1963-1964) 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.

Chern founded the Nankai Institute for Mathematics (NKIM) at his alma mater Nankai in Tianjin. The institute was formally established in 1984 and fully opened in October 17, 1985. NKIM was renamed the Chern Institute of Mathematics in 2004 after Chern's death.