Shiing-Shen Chern: a great geometer of 20th century

DOI10.4310/ICCM.2020.V8.N1.A1MaRDI QIDQ2227772zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 15 February 2021

Published in ICCM Notices (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.4310/iccm.2020.v8.n1.a1

Cartan-Kähler theory Chern classes Gauss-Bonnet formula

History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies (01A70) History of differential geometry (53-03)

Review text

This is the first of a series of lectures on ``Literature on mathematical sciences aiming at introducing students to a global view on mathematics which shows the connection between different though related fields. The author has chosen to focus upon his mentor S.-S. Chern (1911--2004) and the giants on whose shoulders he stood: Blaschke, Kähler, Cartan and Weyl. But his talk goes even further back, including a very concise review of the foundation of 19th-century modern geometry, in particular Riemann's intrinsic geometry, geometry based on the study of the relevant family of linear subspaces, and symmetries. The birth of modern differential geometry is the center of attention of the next section, where Weyl and Hopf are the main protagonists. In the main part on S.-S. Chern, the author proceeds chronologically from his time at the Tsinghua University in Peking, his time with Kähler and Blaschke in Hamburg and then in Paris with E. Cartan, for whom Chern (and Weyl) had considerable admiration. Chern's work in geometry is where the author goes into some details to show conceptual influences that allowed him to proof intrinsically the Gauss-Bonnet formula and to discover Chern classes. \textit{S.-S. Chern}'s paper [Ann. Math. (2) 47, 85--121 (1946; Zbl 0060.41416)] is what the author considers the most fundamental and shows why defining Chern classes by differential forms has been of tremendous importance to geometry and physics. Chern's activities after 1949 at the IAS, in Chicago and in Berkeley are sketched rather briefly ending with mentioning his work in the 1970s with Simons and Moser on invariants. It is rather amusing to read in the author's conclusion that Chern ``always regretted the fact that ancient Chinese mathematicians never discovered complex numbers. Chern's everlasting contributions to the field of complex geometry make up for that shortcoming in Chinese mathematics over the preceding thousand years. As science is never pure, history isn't either!

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