Biography
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.
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-K?hler theory, and finishing his doctoral degree in 1936. In 1936–1937 he studied with ?lie Cartan in Paris, returning to Beijing, China to a professorial position in Tsinghua .
In 1943 Chern went to the Institute for Advanced Study at , 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 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.
Research
Chern's work spreads over all the classic fields of differential geometry. It includes areas currently fashionable , perennial , the foundational , and some areas such as projective differential geometry and s 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 ?lie 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.
Honours and awards
He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975; the Wolf Prize in mathematics in 1984; and the Shaw Prize in mathematical sciences in May, 2004.
The asteroid 29552 Chern is named after him.
Family
His wife, Shih-ning Chern, who he married in 1939, died in 2000. He also had a daughter, May Chu and a son named Paul.
Transliteration and pronunciation
Chern's surname is a common Chinese surname which is now usually spelt . The unusual spelling "Chern" is a transliteration in the old Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization for used in the early twentieth century China. It uses special spelling rules to indicate different tones of Mandarin, which is a tonal language with four tones. The silent r in "Chern" indicates a syllable, written "Chén" in pinyin but in practice often written by non-Chinese without the tonal mark. In GR the spelling of his given name "Shiing-Shen" indicates a third tone for Shiing and a first tone for Shen, which are equivalent to the syllables "Xǐngshēn" in pinyin.
In English, Chern pronounced his name "Churn," and this pronunciation is now universally accepted among English-speaking mathematicians and physicists.
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