On October 28, 1911, Chen Province was born in a scholarly mansion in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, and his father Chen Baozhen took the phrase "My Three Provinces and My Body" from his great-grandson and named him "Provincial Body". At that time, the Xinhai Revolution had just begun, the dying Qing Dynasty had already entered the brink of collapse, and the land of Shenzhou was ushering in new vitality in the midst of great changes. But no one knows that at the other end of history, mathematics, has quietly turned the next page in this ancient water town. (This article is included in the Zhisha "People · Everyone" series, also welcome readers and friends in the comment area to recommend ancient and modern Chinese and foreign outstanding academic figures, Zhishe will choose the right production to include! ）
Chen was gifted in mathematics. When he was young, his family did not hire a special teacher to teach Chen Shengsheng arithmetic, but he simply learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide under the guidance of his father. After his father left home, Chen Shengsheng relied on a copy of "Pen Math" brought back by his father, studied hard and completed a large number of exercises on his own. At the age of 9, he almost never studied in the first elementary school, but was admitted to Xiuzhou Middle School with excellent mathematical results.
In 1922, Chen Jiabei moved to Tianjin. Chen attended Rotary Secondary School the following year. Rotary Secondary School is well funded and resourced. Principal Gu Zanting attaches great importance to mathematics and even teaches geometry courses himself. The gifted Chen Shengsheng was rightfully the principal's proud student. By the fourth year, he was able to do many of the questions in cambridge university honours degree examinations cited in English textbooks.
Chen Shengshen is not a well-behaved student, interest is the only driving force to support his learning, and he is very perfunctory about subjects that he is not interested in. He admits that his learning status is, "If I want to be interested, I can do it." It doesn't matter if the score is good or bad. My math scores were always good anyway, and the rest of the homework was mediocre, but I always passed, even better than passing. Of course it would be nice to spend some effort, but I'm too lazy to spend it. ”
"Paper Kite"
Paper kites ah paper kites!
I envy you for holding you high in the air.
But why are you uncomfortable blowing around?
Could it be that it is blown by the breeze,
The lower part is pulled by the twine,
So you can't go straight up,
Straight down to the flat sun.
But poor you!
Why is this not free?
Turns out you don't have the ability to automate?
Only to end up with such distress.
——Chen Shengshen, published in the school magazine Rotary in 1926
After graduating from Chen Shengshen Middle School, he applied for Nankai University. However, because he had not studied analytic geometry before, he had to borrow the textbook of Nankai Middle School, study it for three weeks, and then enter Nankai. At that time, Chen Was not yet 15 years old, but he did not study preparatory department and directly entered Nankai University. In 1927, Chen Shengshen, because of his aversion to experimentation, switched to majoring in mathematics, studying under the guidance of mathematician Jiang Lifu. At Nankai University, Chen Shengsheng's mathematical talents have been fully cultivated. In his spare time, he also studied German and French in order to read mathematical works in German and French. It was also during this period that Chen Made the life decision of "dedicating himself to the cause of mathematics".
After graduating from Nankai, Chen went to tsinghua university to study for graduate school in the Department of Arithmetic, the first modern mathematical research institution in China. After arriving at Tsinghua University, Chen Studied a wide range of courses, and the main direction was to follow the mathematician Sun Guangyuan to study projective differential geometry. Chen Met Many peers at Tsinghua, and Hua Luogeng was one of them. Chen Hua and chen Hua thus formed a lifelong friendship and became an eternal good story in the Chinese mathematical community. Chen Shengsheng, who had excellent grades, eventually became China's first master's degree in mathematics, and at the same time he also won a publicly funded study abroad quota.
After much deliberation, Chen decided to go to the University of Hamburg in Germany for further study. On the one hand, this is because the University of Hamburg at that time gathered a large number of mathematical talents and masters; on the other hand, it was also because the University of Hamburg was friendly and tolerant of Chinese, and many Chinese mathematicians studied here. Chen went to Germany this time and threw himself into the hands of the mathematician Blaschke. Braschk first submitted several of his papers to Chen Shengshen for study, and he did not expect that Chen Shengshen had found a loophole in the paper. Blashk was surprised and happy, so he ordered Chen to make corrections. Chen immediately completed a paper to correct the gaps, and also popularized Braschke's theorem. After the publication of the paper, Chen shengsheng has already gained a firm foothold in Hamburg. And that's only a month away from his enrollment. Chen received his Ph.D. under the guidance of Braschke, and under the latter's "strong advocacy", chose to go to Paris to follow the mathematical master Kadang for postdoctoral research.
Kadang was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and chen's proposal, which Blaschke called him, was "greatly fortunate" for him. Cartan's work covers the entirety of differential geometry in a broad sense, and many of his ideas and conclusions, from Lie groups, differential equations, and geometry, are fundamental. However, Kadon's writings are also notoriously obscure. Even the famous mathematician Weil commented that his books and articles were "extremely difficult to understand." But Chen was able to understand Kadang's thought clearly and deeply. He was also favored by Jiadang, who often invited Chen to his home for a deep conversation. Some critics have commented on Chen Shengsheng, "He is proficient in differential forms of computing techniques and skillfully uses it in geometric problems, which is the wand passed down to him by his teacher geometry master Kadang, allowing him to enter new fields of mathematics that are difficult for others to enter." Chen Shengsheng perfectly inherited the mantle of Jiadang and gradually established himself as a first-class mathematician.
Kadang and Chen province
In 1937, the Lugou Bridge Incident occurred, and only 3 days later, Chen Shengsheng bid farewell to Jiadang and left France to return to China. Chen, who returned to China, became a professor at Tsinghua University. During the Japanese war of aggression against China, Chen Shengshen, together with patriotic intellectuals, traveled to Changsha, Kunming, and other places to build and develop China's scientific and educational undertakings. However, Chen Shengsheng never left his research career, and in addition to teaching, he still devoted himself to research and worked hard. At the time of the war, traffic was blocked, but with the help of Jiadang, Chen Shengshen still obtained most of Jiadang's monographs. Chen studied these articles assiduously and initiated new thinking on many aspects of them.
In 1943, Chen was invited by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to do visiting research. In the United States, he has had in-depth cooperation and exchanges with many mathematicians in the world. In 1944, Chen published his "most proud article of his life" ——— "A Simple Implicit Proof of the Gauss-Bonnet Formula for Closed RiemannIan Manifolds." He used the "inner bundle" to solve this "extremely important and difficult problem in geometry" and make it "the starting point of modern differential geometry". In 1945, he further discovered the famous "chenzhi sex class". To this day, these works have had a broad and profound impact on the development of the entire mathematical community and even the theoretical physics community. It can be said that the two years in Princeton were the most fruitful period for Chen Shengsheng.
In 1946, at the age of 35, Chen's academic status and domestic prestige were in full swing. In April of that year, Chen left the United States and returned to Shanghai. Before returning to China, he was reappointed as a professor in the Department of Mathematics by Tsinghua University. After arriving in Shanghai, the Academia Sinica set up by the Kuomintang hired him as a full-time researcher and planned to appoint him as the acting director of the Preparatory Department of the Institute of Mathematics of the Academia Sinica. After many considerations, Chen Shengshen finally chose to go to Nanjing. On the Tsinghua side, Mei Yiqi and Ye Qisun stayed fruitlessly. In July 1947, the Institute of Mathematics of the Academia Sinica was established, and Chen Shengsheng served as the acting director.
However, due to social, economic and political factors, Chen's idea of staying in China to establish a mathematical research institute began to waver. So in October 1948, at the kind invitation of Oppenheimer, president of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Chen decided to work in the United States with his family. After arriving in the United States, Chen sighed, "Although I am at home, I look west to my homeland, return to my hometown without a day, and I feel a thousand emotions, but I can only forget my feelings through my work." Years later, Chen Recalls his efforts at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academia Sinica and still laments that it was "sacrificing oneself and not helping others."
After going to the United States, Chen Province immersed himself in academics and tirelessly taught people. He collaborated with international mathematicians to promote the integration of differential geometry with other fields of mathematics. Their efforts gradually pushed differential geometry "to the center stage of mathematics." In March 1961, Chen became a citizen of the United States and was immediately elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, achieving a pivotal position in the American mathematical community. Previously, only the Chinese scientist Wu Jianxiong had achieved the same honor. The famous mathematician Osseman said: "The decisive factor in the revival of geometry in the United States, I think, should be Chen Shengsheng's coming to the United States from China in the late 1940s." In addition, Chen Shengshen has trained many outstanding mathematicians, and Chinese mathematicians such as Yau Chengtong and Liao Shantao have been taught by him.
In his lifetime, Chen Shengshen published more than ten monographs and textbooks, published more than 150 articles, and his research areas covered many aspects such as projective differential geometry, Euclidean differential geometry, geometric structure and their intrinsic connections, integral geometry, indicative classes, holomorphic mapping, polar small boy manifolds, nets, external differential systems and partial differential equations, and many other aspects, with countless achievements. Three of the most famous are: one is the implicit proof of the Gauss-Bonnet formula. In 1944, Chen published his "most proud article of his life" ——— "A Simple Implicit Proof of the Gauss-Bonnet Formula for closed Riemannymannian manifolds." He used the "inner bundle" to solve this "extremely important and difficult problem in geometry" and made it "the starting point of modern differential geometry".
The second is the fiber bundle theory and the "chen indicative class". In 1945, Chen published the article "The Indicative Class of Emmett Manifolds", which introduced the famous "ChenZhi Class". He not only gives a clear description of the relevant concepts, but also proposes methods, tools and examples for conducting quantitative research in this area. This gives a new look to the fiber bundle and the indicative class theory. Later, Yang Zhenning successfully used the mathematical fiber cluster theory to establish an exceptionally important gauge field theory in the field of physics. Yang Zhenning was also impressed by Chen Shengsheng's knowledge. He praised Chen's fiber bush and indicative class theory, which is not only an epoch-making contribution, but also a very wonderful idea."
The third is a wide range of differential geometry. In 1946, Chen Published Several New Perspectives on Large-Scale Differential Geometry, which pointed out the close connection between Kadang's geometric ideas and fiber cluster theory, and advanced differential geometry to a large-scale situation. As a result, differential geometry developed into a large-scale differential geometry theory pioneered by Chen Shengshen, and the study of differential geometry entered a new era.
Chen has won numerous awards in his lifetime. In 1970, the American Mathematical Society awarded him the Chavennet Prize; in 1975, the United States awarded him the National Science Prize; in 1982, Germany awarded him the Humboldt Prize for Research; in 1983, the American Mathematical Society awarded him the Steele Prize; in 1984, he won the Wolf Prize, one of the most important mathematical prizes in the world, and he was the first Chinese to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. In 2009, in order to commemorate chen shengsheng's outstanding contributions, the International Mathematical Union and the Chen Shengshen Foundation cooperated to establish the Chen Shengsheng Prize.
When talking about how to become a good mathematician, Chen Said Bluntly Says That You Need "Half Talent, Half Luck." Perhaps for a top mathematician like him, effort has become a necessity that does not need to be mentioned.
At 19:14 on December 3, 2004, Chen Died of Illness in Tianjin. Many students of Nankai University spontaneously gathered to observe a moment of silence for them. His disciple Qiu Chengtong wrote that before his death, Chen Said he was going to meet the great geometrists of ancient Greece. However, in the eyes of more people, he has entered the ranks of the great geometricians. Yang Zhenning once wrote a poem praising Chen Shengsheng, and attached it, or could be used to follow the sages.
"Title Chen Class"
Yang Zhenning
The clothes are seamless and the ingenuity is cut.
Unity and splendor.
Creation of love geometry, four force fiber energy.
Thousands of years of heart, Ogo Li Jia Chen.