Mathematician Chen Shengshen (1911-2004). One of the greatest geometricians of the 20th century, he is known as the "father of integral differential geometry".
*The original title of this article was "Eternal Remembrance - Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Mr. Chen Shengshen"; the author is a famous mathematician, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and professor of Nankai University
The author | Zhang Weiping
Editor| Zhang Guo
2021 is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Mr. Chen Shengshen, an international master of mathematics, and many predecessors and colleagues have written commemorative articles to recall Mr. Chen's outstanding achievements and major contributions to the development of Chinese mathematics from all aspects. As one of the last two students enrolled by Mr. Chen in Nankai Mathematics Institute, I have always remembered Mr. Chen's care and cultivation for me. Here are also the memories of my interaction with Mr. Chen as a souvenir.
I first met Mr. Chen at the "Academic Year of Geometry and Topology" held by the Nankai Institute of Mathematics from 1986 to 1987. As a graduate student at the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, I attended lectures during the academic year. At that time, of course, it was only a distant and reverential appreciation of the master's style. I remember that in that year, my master's supervisor, Professor Yu Yanlin, was invited by Mr. Chen to teach the Atiyah-Singer index theorem of the Dirac operator in the academic year, which benefited a large number of young students, including me. And Mr. Chen's words relayed by Teacher Yu, "Even if you can't come up with an article, you must engage in the indicator theorem" is still in your ears.
Another sentence of Mr. Chen also had a profound impact on me, that is, to study mathematics well in Chinese land, not necessarily to go to the United States to take the TOEFL. Affected by this, neither my Chinese Academy of Sciences classmate Zhou Xiangyu nor I later went to the TOEFL test.
The specific contact with Mr. Chen stems from the generosity of Teacher Yu Yanlin. When I was about to graduate from my master's degree, I asked Mr. Yu to say that I would like to continue my doctoral studies with him. Teacher Yu said that I had "no future" with him and wanted to recommend me to Nankai with Mr. Chen. Of course I can't say no to this... Of course, Mr. Chen can't just recruit students casually. After Teacher Yu recommended it to him, he asked me to go to Nankai to make a report first. In this way, my first contact with Mr. Chen began with an academic report in front of him, which was of course very nervous. I remember that after I finished my report, Mr. Chen commented on Teacher Yu: "I want to talk about too many things in a short period of time, and young people are like this." "That's it. Of course, before officially entering Nankai, I still need to pass the national unified doctoral entrance examination like everyone else, fortunately, I also passed the examination. At the same time as me, Mr. Chen's doctoral student was Wang Changping, a graduate of Peking University. Because he was older than me, I called him a brother.
In the fall of 1988, Changping and I officially became Mr. Chen's students. I remember the first time we went to see Mr. Chen, Mr. Chen's few understated words eliminated our uneasiness. At that time, Mr. Chen told us that he wanted to resign from the post of director of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics and concentrate on doing mathematics, but the relevant departments did not agree, so he did not have time to take us both and asked us to go abroad; and said that one would go to Germany and the other to France. In particular, he told me that Paul Malliavin of France asked him about good Chinese students, so he recommended me to study with Mary.
After I returned, I reported Mr. Chen's thoughts to Teacher Yu. Teacher Yu suggested that I better go to the United States to talk to Jeff Cheeger (a geometrist). So the next time I met Mr. Chen alone, I talked about Teacher Yu's thoughts. Mr. Chen said that Chigg already has too many Chinese students, and he has to go to the United States to do TA (teaching assistants), to teach, and to France to concentrate on doing research. I was also too young to let go, and the two of them were a little stiff. After a while, Mr. Chen said: I still have a letter in hand that I have not finished, you go back first, and we will talk tomorrow.
After I came back, I thought about it for half a day, and I thought that it was not interesting to talk to the old man, so when I saw Mr. Chen the next day, I said that I could go to France. And at the next meeting, Mr. Chen said that the letter to Marywan had been sent... This can't help but make me feel very emotional: in general, the teacher asks you to go to a place where you don't go, then you don't want to go anywhere... Therefore, the first contact, Mr. Chen's master's mind, left a deep impression on me as a young offspring. The next year, when Mr. Chen returned home and saw me, he told me that he had talked to Mariawan and asked me to go to France and follow Jean-Michel Bismut (a geometrist). I have even less of a problem with that, because my master's thesis is doing something like Bishm. Now that I think about it, Teacher Yu and Mr. Chen's ideas are not wrong, which can be described as the same thing. A clear example is that I later worked closely with Chigg's student, Dai Xianzhe, and Bissmu and Chigg also jointly won the 2021 Shaw Prize in Mathematics.
At that time, because There was no scholarship system in France, the normal way to study in France was to take the joint training of the former National Education Commission. However, in 1989, Sino-French relations fell to a low point, and by the time I specifically contacted the country, the Sino-French joint training program was indefinitely delayed. After Mr. Chen returned to China this autumn, he was also anxious. At that time, he had just returned from France with a certificate of foreign academician, so he made an appointment with the cultural counselor of the French Embassy in China as a French foreign academician, and personally went to the French embassy in Beijing to tell the cultural counselor that it was necessary to separate politics from academia; then he went to the former State Education Commission to find the relevant leaders and said that he would take out my materials and handle them separately. I sometimes think that I am just a small student, who deserves such a move as a master. And Mr. Chen himself told me that he felt that he had done two things for me (not only that...). ), this counts as one of them.
Another incident occurred shortly after I returned home in 1993 after receiving my PhD from France. At that time, I returned to Nankai, starting from a teaching assistant, with a monthly salary of more than two hundred yuan, and my life was obviously quite tight. Mr. Chen was also a little surprised when he found out. In October 1994, the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation published in the newspaper the list of winners of the Young Teachers Fund and the Young Teachers Award, and Mr. Chen felt that he could get this funding for me because he was a member of the judging committee. Soon, the judging committee will meet in Beijing. At that time, Mr. Chen was suffering from a serious cold in Tianjin, and everyone advised him not to go, but he insisted on going and won funding for me. It is said that he specifically talked to Mr. Fok Yingdong, touched Fok Yingdong and the other judges, and decided to give me a fund equivalent to the first prize. But because the names of the other winners were already in the newspaper, my funding was only given money, and the names were not reported. This is probably unique in the entire Fok Ying Tung Fund and reward winners.
I clearly remember that the day I went to Ningyuan to see Mr. Chen, Mr. Chen said that I won you the Fok Ying Tung Fund, you can consider going out for another year. And I replied, tired, I first stayed in the country to rest and rest - it can also be said to have withstood his "test".
Mathematicians Chen Shengshen (second from left), Zhang Weiping (fourth from left), Liu Kefeng (third from left), Zhou Xiangyu (first from left) and others in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, in 2004.
Speaking of "awards", the other two awards I have won are also related to Mr. Chen. The first is the "Qiushi Outstanding Young Scholar Award" awarded by the Hong Kong Qiushi Foundation since 1995. I remember that in the first half of 1994, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mathematics (MSRI) in Berkeley, California, and Professor Li Anmin was also visiting MSRI. One day we went to Mr. Chen's house together, and Professor Tian Gang, who was visiting Stanford University, was also there. Mr. Chen said in front of us that the Qiushi Foundation has such an award to encourage scholars working in China. I remember that Teacher Li immediately said that if this is the case, he will be more at ease working in China. Later, in 1995, the first batch of winners was announced, and Mr. Li and I were listed. Undoubtedly, the "Qiushi Award" and the "Fok Ying Tung Foundation" together played a role in sending charcoal to my life in Nankai.
The other is the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), now known as the Academy of Sciences for Developing Countries Mathematics Prize. This is a very important International Prize in Mathematics. The first recipient was Mr. Chen's ph.D. at the University of Chicago and Mr. Liao Shantao of Peking University. Before me were Mr. Wu Wenjun and Mr. Zhang Gongqing. One day in July 1999, I suddenly received a fax from Mr. Chen, directly saying "I intend to propose you to be a TWAS Award...", which flattered me. Probably due to Mr. Chen's great prestige, I was successfully awarded the 2000 TWAS Mathematics Prize. I remember that after winning the award, Academician Zhang Gongqing also wrote a congratulatory letter to me. With this award, through the nomination of Mr. Jiang Boju, I was successfully elected as a TWAS academician in 2001 (at that time, there was no requirement for the nomination of TWAS academician to be elected as an academician in his home country). With this title of TWAS academician, I can nominate Professor Long Yiming for the TWAS Mathematics Prize at the beginning of my appointment as the director of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics in 2004. In November 2004, Mr. Long successfully won the 2005 TWAS Mathematics Award, and the good news came that the whole of Nankai, including Mr. Chen, felt extremely happy.
To this day, Chinese mathematicians who have won the TWAS Mathematics Prize, in addition to the above mentioned, include Academician Yuan Yaxiang and Professor Tang Zizhou. Among the 7 winners, Nankai Mathematics has 3, and I think it will make Mr. Chen feel relieved in the Spirit of Heaven.
There are thousands of stories that Mr. Chen cares about growing up with me and other young people, and the above list is just a drop in the ocean. Mr. Chen's series of measures to promote the development of mathematics in China based in Nankai have long been recorded in history. The academic year activities held by the Nankai Institute of Mathematics for 11 consecutive years have created a large number of mathematical leaders, such as Zhou Xiangyu and Fang Fuquan, who participated in the 1986-1987 Geometric and Topology Academic Year, and were later elected as academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The "21st Century Chinese Mathematics Prospect Conference" held in Nankai in August 1988 was of even more landmark significance. The conference named the "Chen Shengshen Conjecture" of "Chinese Mathematics Becoming a Mathematical Power in the Twenty-first Century", and the National Natural Science Foundation of China "Mathematics Tianyuan Fund" was established after the conference, which continued to play a role in the development of Chinese mathematics.
My personal memory is very deeply that on January 12, 2000, my sister Zheng Shining passed away peacefully in her Nankai apartment. The next day, I went to see Mr. Chen, only to see Mr. Chen's tears swirling in his eyes, but Mr. Chen couldn't bear to let it fall. He said to me: "I am doing two things at present, one is to run the International Congress of Mathematicians, and the second is to run the Nankai Institute of Mathematics." ”
We can see that Mr. Chen later devoted almost all of his efforts to these two things. He ingeniously held the "Zhou Weiliang and Chen Guocai Memorial Meeting - International Conference on Algebraic Topology and Algebraic Geometry" in Nankai, which facilitated the reception of the president of the International Mathematical Union by the top Chinese leaders, paving the way for the first international congress of mathematicians to be held in a developing country (in Beijing in 2002); at the same time, he also proposed the construction of a new building of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics, which provided a substantive guarantee for the subsequent development of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics.
For Chinese mathematics and Nankai mathematics, "bow down and die", Mr. Chen's speech at the inaugural meeting of the Nankai Institute of Mathematics in 1985 has become the criterion for him to practice.
At the end of 2005, on the occasion of the first anniversary of Mr. Chen's death, the Nankai Institute of Mathematics was renamed the Chen Provincial Institute of Mathematics, and Comrade Jiang Zemin personally inscribed the name of the institute, which fully reflected the high affirmation of the state leaders for Mr. Chen and his contributions.
When the mountains are full of flowers, "he" laughs in the bushes - on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of Mr. Chen's birth, we hope that the "Chen Shengsheng conjecture" of "China has become a mathematical power and a strong country" will be resolved as soon as possible.
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Produced by China Youth Daily and China Youth Network