CHERN, SHIING-SHEN

born Oct. 26, 1911, Chia-hsing, Chekiang province, China Chinese-American mathematician and educator whose researches in differential geometry include the development of the Chern characteristic classes in fibre spaces, which play a major role in mathematics and in mathematical physics. Chern graduated from Nankai University in Tientsin, China, in 1930; he received his M.S. degree in 1934 from Tsing Hua University, Peking, and his doctor of sciences degree from the University of Hamburg in 1936. A year later he returned to Tsing Hua University as professor of mathematics. Chern was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., from 1943 to 1945. In 1946 he returned to China to become acting director of the Institute of Mathematics at the Academia Sinica in Nanking. Chern returned to the United States in 1949 and taught at the University of Chicago and later at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1961 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Chern served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society (1963-64) and was elected to both the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983/84. He founded and was the director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, Calif. (1981-84), and the Nankai Institute of Mathematics, Tianjin, China (from 1985).