The Chern Lectures

The Shiing-Shen Chern Chair in Mathematics was established by a generous donation by Dr. Robert G. Uomini, a 1976 graduate from UC Berkeley, and Ms. Louise B. Bidwell in honor of one of the 20th century's greatest geometers, Shiing-Shen Chern, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley. Funds from the endowment are used to support one or more distinguished visiting mathematicians each year as well as teaching and research activities related to the visitors. The visitors are referred to as The Shiing-Shen Chern Visiting Professors.

The 2013 Chern Lectures will be given by Nigel Hitchin, of Oxford University, on April 9th, 11th, 16th, and 18th.

Lecture 1:
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 50, Birge Hall

Quaternionic manifolds.

A reception in honor of the speaker will be held following the first lecture at 5:15 pm in 1015 Evans Hall. 

Lecture 2:
Thursday, April 11, 2013
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 60, Evans Hall

Moduli spaces.


Lecture 3:
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 141, McCone Hall

Twistors and holomorphic geometry.


Lecture 4:
Thursday, April 18, 2013
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 60, Evans Hall

Correspondences.

Professor Chern (1911-2004) is widely regarded as the greatest geometer of his generation. For more than six decades, he was a leader in the field of differential geometry and made significant contributions to such diverse areas as the geometry of fibre bundles, complex geometry, web geometry, integral geometry, Nevalinna theory, and the classical theory of submanifolds in euclidean space. Professor Chern completed his doctorate in 1936 in Hamburg. During his stay at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1943-1945, he did his ground-breaking work on characteristic classes and fibre bundles. When he returned to China in 1946, he set himself the task of introducing modern mathematics to China and succeeded in training a new generation of Chinese mathematicians. Professor Chern taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1960, when he came to Berkeley. He was a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He retired in 1979.

Additional biographical information can be found at:

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/shiingshenchern.htm

Past Chern Visiting Professors

1996 Sir Michael Atiyah
1997 Richard Stanley
1998 Friedrich Hirzebruch
1999 Michael Artin
        Yuri Manin
2000 Don Zagier
2001 Joseph Bernstein
        Peter Lax
        Bertram Kostant
2005 Terence Tao
2007 Vladimir Igorevich Arnold
2008 Dennis Sullivan
2009 Richard Taylor
2010 Peter S. Ozsvath
2011 Andrei Okounkov
2012 Jean Bourgain