Wei-Liang Chow

Chow Wei-Liang (1 October 1911 in Shanghai to 10 August 1995 in Baltimore) was a Chinese-American mathematician and stamp collector, well known for his work in algebraic geometry. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1931, attended the University of Göttingen in 1932 and then worked at Leipzig University with Van der Waerden, with whom he produced a series of joint papers on intersection theory that introduced what are now called Chow coordinates. He married Margot Victor in 1936 and took a position at the National Central University in Nanjing, where the war seriously affected his work. From 1948 to 1977 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. His book on the first issue of the Shanghai Local Post, published in 1996, reflects his interest in stamps.