Wu Wenjun

Wu Wenjun

Wu Wenjun ( Chinese  吴文俊 , Pinyin Wú Wénjùn , W.-G. Wu Wen-Tsün ; born May 12, 1919 in Shanghai ; † May 7, 2017 in Beijing ) was a Chinese mathematician ( differential geometry , topology , algorithmic geometry ). His name is also quoted as Wen-Tsun Wu or Wu Wen-Tsun.

life and work

Wu graduated from Jiaotong University in Shanghai in 1940 and then worked as a teacher - China was occupied by the Japanese and in the middle of the war. In 1946 he met Shiing-Shen Chern , who was building the Mathematics Institute of the Academia Sinica and accepted him as a student. Wu showed Chern a simpler proof (than Whitney's) of Hassler Whitney's product set for spherical fiber bundles and was accepted for study abroad after a nationwide exam in 1947. In 1949 he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg under Charles Ehresmann ( Sur les classes caractéristiques des structures fibrées sphériques ). In Strasbourg he also came into contact with René Thom , who characterizes him in his autobiography as a reserved and friendly Chinese, whose accounts were legendary for their reliability . In 1950 Wu studied further in Paris with Henri Cartan , where he discovered the characteristic classes named after him. In 1951 he returned to China and from 1953 became a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences . In the 1950s he investigated embedding problems in Euclidean spaces and introduced embedding classes - summarized in a book in 1965.

After being sent to a computer factory during the Cultural Revolution , he became interested in automatic proofs in elementary geometry in the 1970s, which became his future field of work (which he calls "the mechanization of mathematics"). In 1977 he proved a central proposition based on the methods of Joseph Ritt . He also proved that Dennis Sullivan's rational homotopy theory can be treated algorithmically.

In 1957 he was accepted into the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1991 he received the mathematics prize of the Academy of Developing Countries. In 1997 he received the Herbrand Award . In 2000 he received the First State Prize in Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (together with Yuan Longping ), presented by Jiang Zemin . In 2006 he received the Shaw Prize together with David Mumford .

Wu also studied the history of Chinese mathematics and was the editor of a major eight volume history of Chinese mathematics. He also gave a lecture on it at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley in 1986 ( Recent studies in the history of Chinese mathematics ).

Fonts

• Theory of imbedding immersion and isotopy of polytopes in an euclidean space. 1965
• Mathematical theorem proving in geometry. Springer 1994
• Mathematics Mechanization. Springer 2000
• Rational Homotopy Type. Springer 1987
• Selected Works of Wen Tsun-Wu. World Scientific 2006

literature

• Jiri Hudecek: Ancient chinese mathematics in action: Wu Wen-Tsun's nationalist historicism after the cultural revolution, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, 2012, pp. 41-64, Citeseer , pdf

Web links

• Shaw Prize Autobiography
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Wu Wenjun. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Remarks

1. ↑ 首届 国家 最高 科技 奖 得主 吴文俊 院士 逝世. In: sciencenet.cn. May 7, 2017, Retrieved May 7, 2017 (Chinese).
2. ↑ A discreet and kindley Chinese Whose calculations were legendary in Their reliability , Rene Thom, autobiography in Atiyah, Iagolnitzer Fields Medaillist Lectures , World Scientific, 1997, p 73
3. ↑ Autobiographical note on the award of the Shaw Prize

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wu is the family name here, Wenjun is the first name.