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"Fifty Years of Differential Geometry"
¡@¡@Born in 1911 in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, China. Professor Chern received his education from Nankai University and Tsinghua University before he furthered his studies at the University of Hamburg in Germany. After he returned China, he had been teaching at Tsinghua University and the South-West Associate University. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from the summer of 1943 to the fall of 1945 when he did his research in mathematical works. From 1946 to 1948, he was working for the Academia Sinica to start an institute of mathematics. In 1948, he left for the US and later joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, where he retired from in 1989. ¡@¡@Professor Chern was the first director of the US Natural Science Foundation's first mathematical research institute, named Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). He held this position till 1985, the year he became the director of the Institute of Mathematics at his alma mater, Nankai University. He became director emeritus in 1993. ¡@¡@Professor Chern has devoted himself to the mathematical research and education for over half a century and was honoured by many national academies in the world, as members or foreign members. Among them are Academia Sinica (1948), US National Academy of Sciences (1961), Brazilian Academy of Sciences (1971), Third World Academy of Sciences (1983), Royal Society of London (1985), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1988), L'Academie des Sciences de Paris (1989), American Philosophical Society (1989), Chinese Academy of Sciences (1994), and Russian Academy of Sciences (2001). ¡@¡@He was also awarded honorary doctoral degrees from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1969), University of Chicago (1969), University of Hamburg (1971), Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich (1982) Nankai University (1985), State University of New York at Stony Brook (1985), Notre Dame University (1994) and Technische Universitat Berlin (2001) and prizes including Chauvenet Prize (1970), National Medal of Science (1975), Steele Prize (1983), Wolf Prize (1984) and Lobachevsky Prize (2003). The Shaw Prize is an international prize established in November 2002 to honour scientists, regardless of race, nationality and religious belief, who have achieved significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application, and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind. ¡@¡@The Shaw Prize consists of three annual awards: the Prize in Astronomy, the Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Professor Chern was awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences 2004 for his initiation of the field of global differential geometry and his continued leadership of the field, resulting in beautiful developments that are at the centre of contemporary mathematics, with deep connections to topology, algebra and analysis, in short, to all major branches of mathematics of the last sixty years. |