Shiing-shen ChernBorn 26 Oct 1911; died 3 Dec 2004 at age 93. Chinese-American mathematician and educator whose researches in differential geometry include the development of the Chern characteristic classes in fibre spaces, which play a major role in mathematics and in mathematical physics. “When Chern was working on differential geometry in the 1940s, this area of mathematics was at a low point. Global differential geometry was only beginning, even Morse theory was understood and used by a very small number of people. Today, differential geometry is a major subject in mathematics and a large share of the credit for this transformation goes to Professor Chern.”- C N Yang, quoted from the book, Chern, a great geometer of the twentieth century. (1992) |
