Shiing-Shen Chern

Shiing-Shen Chern was a Chinese-born American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology and has been called the father of modern differential geometry. Born in 1911 in Xiushui, Jiaxing, China, he studied at Nankai University and Tsinghua University, then worked at the University of Hamburg under Wilhelm Blaschke and took his doctorate there in 1936. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, spent about a decade at the University of Chicago, and from 1960 taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he cofounded and directed the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. His name is attached to Chern classes, Chern-Simons theory and the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet theorem. He won the Wolf Prize and the inaugural Shaw Prize, and the International Mathematical Union created the Chern Medal in his memory in 2010.