Shiing-Shen Chern

     I have talked about several mathematicians I like in my blog,so next two blogs I will talk about several great mathematicians from China.They are really good examples for us to follow.And their experience and successful show we Chinese also have good talents for mathematics.The first Chinese mathematician I want to talk about is Shiing-Shen Chern.

      Shiing-Shen Chern (October 26, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese-born American mathematician. He was regarded as one of the leaders in differential geometry of the twentieth century. Chern's work extends over all the classic fields of differential geometry. It includes areas currently fashionable (the Chern-Simons theory arising from a 1974 paper written jointly with Jim-Simons), perennial (the Chern-Weil theory linking curvature invariants to characteristic classes from 1944, after the Weil paper of 1943 on the Gauss-Bonnet theorem), the foundational (Chern classes), and some areas such as projective differential geometry. He published results in integral geometry,value distribution theory of holomophic functions and minimal submanifolds.

He was a follower of Cartan, working 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 pseudo group 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.

       Chern is one of the leaders in differential geometry and he really did great jobs in this field.In fact he uses his idea and method to affect the whole world of geometry.He is not only a great mathematician,but also a great educator.He really did a lot of things for Chinese mathematics.He tried his best to select students who were good  at mathematics to send them abroad for further study and his students have become great mathematicians in all field of math.He is really great,and I really admire him.