Ky Fan

Ky Fan (1914 to 2010) was a Chinese-American mathematician regarded as one of the most influential mathematicians from China and one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. Born in Hangzhou, he took his B.S. at Peking University in 1936 and his D.Sc. at the University of Paris in 1941 under Maurice Frechet. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1945 to 1947, then taught at Notre Dame, Wayne State and Northwestern before becoming a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965. His work was unusually versatile, covering linear and nonlinear analysis, convex analysis and inequalities, fixed point theory, operator and matrix theory, linear and nonlinear programming, topology and topological groups. A minimax principle of his underlies the basic theorem of Gerard Debreu in mathematical economics. The Ky Fan norms, inequality, lemma and metric carry his name. He was elected to Academia Sinica in 1964, directed its Institute of Mathematics from 1978 to 1984, and had 23 graduate students.