| RefNo | EC/1985/42 |
| Previous numbers | Cert XXI, 224 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Chern, Shiing-Shen: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1983 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Professor Chern is generally regarded as the father of modern differential geometry. He has had a long and distinguished career first in China, at Tsinghua University and at the Academia Sinica Institute of Mathematics in Nanking, then in the United States at the Universities of Chicago and Berkeley, California. Most recently he was the first Director of the new Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley.
One of the central and most active areas of mathematics in the mid-twentieth century has been that of global differential geometry involving topological aspects of differential equations. For over forty years Chern has been a key figure in these developments, doing fundamental pioneering work and training generations of able students who have gone on to become leading workers in the field.
Modern differential geometry can really be dated to the enormously influential papers of Chern in the mid 1940s, giving his generalization of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem and the birth of the theory of characteristic classes. In the 1960s Chern turned his attention to holomorphic mappings, providing the right geometrical framework in which to extend to several complex variables much of classical function theory.
Minimal surfaces (soap-films) and their generalizations to high dimensions were also studied extensively by Chern and, through the work of his student Yau, they are very much to the fore in current work. There is his famous paper with Moser on the geometry of boundaries of pseudo-convex domains, his work with Bott generalizing the classical Picard theorem and his very substantial paper with Griffiths on the geometry of webs. This last testifies to the length of Chern's working career since it takes up again (in the 1970s) an early topic studied by Chern in Germany in the 1930s.
In addition Chern essentially single-handedly made Elie Cartan's view-point of moving frames, developed in the aftermath of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, available to modern geometers.
In recent years, with the changing relation between China and the West, Chern has played a prominent part in helping Chinese mathematicians rebuild their contacts with the outside world. He holds an honorary appointment as Professor at Beijing and spends a considerable time there lecturing and generally assisting China's mathematics.
Professor Chern is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and of the Academia Sinica. In 1976 he received the National Medal of Science from President Ford.
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| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA3936 | Chern; Shiing-Shen (1911 - 2004) | 1911 - 2004 |