scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1535646

Publication date 26 November 2000

Chuan-Chih Hsiung was born in 1916 in a small village in China, moved to Nanchang when he was 3 years old, attended the provincial high school, and received graduation in 1932 under Professor Su Buchin. He worked mainly on problems of differential geometry of curves and surfaces in projective space during that period. In 1946 he went to the United States where his research interests turned to global questions, mainly under the influence of H.~Whitney at Harvard University. He held several positions as lecturer and professor, mostly at Lehigh University. He was the founder and is still the editor in chief of the Journal of Differential Geometry, making great impact on this field, which, under the influence of this journal, became a very active branch of mathematics, with a scope far exceeding its former classical one. He has contributed a rich variety of important ideas and results raising the state of knowledge in differential geometry significantly. His early papers are concerned with projective differential invariants of intersections of curves, surfaces, and hypersurfaces. There is also a paper of 1949 dealing with affine invariants of hypersurfaces. The papers following next in this collection, dated from 1956 and later, are concerned with global questions of hypersurfaces and open a new period of research in Riemannian and Hermitian geometry, considering both, global questions of submanifolds as well as differential topology of the ambient spaces. We mention papers on congruence of hypersurfaces in space forms, isometry questions, curvature and characteristic classes, cobordism, spectral problems, groups of conformal or isometric transformations, Hermitian structures and others. From more than 100 papers of his, Chuan-Chih Hsiung selected 64 for this book. The last one is an unpublished revision of his work of 1986 on the long standing problem of nonexistence of an almost complex structure on the 6-dimensional sphere. Personal remarks on some of these papers are added on three pages at the end. This book is a rich source of interesting ideas, methods and results of a branch of mathematics, that has undergone a deep increase during the last 50 years and the themes of the papers picture and reflect the historical development of differential geometry during this period.

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