Hsien Chung Wang

Hsien Chung (or Hsien-Chung or Hsien-chung) Wang ( 王宪钟 Wang Xian Zhong, 18 April 1918, Beijing – 25 June 1978, New York City) was a Chinese-American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry, Lie groups, and algebraic topology.

Biography

Part of a family, from Shantung Province, that had produced distinguished scholars for several generations, Hsien Chung Wang studied in Tientsin at Nankai High School, where he had an outstanding academic record. In 1936 he matriculated at Tsing Hua University in Beijing.

On 7 July 1937 Japanese and Chinese troops clashed near Peking. In late July further fighting broke out and the Japanese quickly captured Peking and Tientsin. Tsing Hua University was moved to Southwest China where it was amalgamated with Nankai and Peking universities. Wang had to journey to the new site of his university and begin his studies again. Perhaps the political events had a positive effect as far as mathematics was concerned since Wang changed his studies to mathematics when he took them up again at the re-established university.

Wang graduated in 1941 and began to study under S S Chern. He was awarded a master's degree in 1944 and began teaching in a school. However, after one year, he was awarded a British Council Scholarship to continue his studies in England. After a while at Sheffield he studied under Newman at Manchester and received a Ph.D. in 1948. ^[1]

After completing his Ph.D., Wang went to the United States.

His first appointment was to the position of lecturer at Louisiana State University. Despite a heavy teaching load, H.C. remained active and successful in research. His achievement was recognized by a visiting membership of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton in 1951-52. He was highly esteemed by the faculty of the institute and was invited back in 1954-55,1961-62, and 1965. His work became widely known and appreciated in the early 1950s. He held positions at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, the University of Washington, Columbia University, and Northwestern University. In 1966 he accepted a professorship at Cornell and was one of the most respected and distinguished members of the Cornell faculty until his sudden death from leukemia.^[2]

He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1958 in Edinburgh.^[3] He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1960–1961.^[4] The Wang sequence used in algebraic topology is named in his honor.^[1]

He married in 1956 and was the father of three daughters.^[5]

Selected publications

• with S. S. Chern: "Differential geometry in symplectic space." I, Sci. Rep. Nat. Tsing Hua Univ 4 (1947): 453–477.
• "Axiom of the plane in a general space of paths." Annals of Mathematics (1948): 731–737. doi:10.2307/1969056
• "The homology groups of the fibre-bundles over a sphere." Duke Math. J 16 (1949): 33–38.
• "Homogeneous spaces with non-vanishing Euler characteristics." Annals of Mathematics (1949): 925–953. doi:10.2307/1969588
• "A problem of PA Smith." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 1, no. 1 (1950): 18–19. MR 0033288
• "A remark on transformation groups leaving fixed an end point." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 3, no. 4 (1952): 548–549. MR 0048803
• "One-dimensional cohomology group of locally compact metrically homogeneous space." Duke Mathematical Journal 19, no. 2 (1952): 303–310. MR 0047672
• "Complex parallisable manifolds." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 5, no. 5 (1954): 771–776. MR 0074064
• with Kentaro Yano: "A class of affinely connected spaces." Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 80, no. 1 (1955): 72–92. MR 0073254
• "Discrete subgroups of solvable Lie groups I." Annals of Mathematics (1956): 1–19. doi:10.2307/1969948
• with William M. Boothby: "On contact manifolds." Annals of Mathematics (1958): 721–734. doi:10.2307/1970165
• "Compact transformation groups of Sⁿ with an (n–1)-dimensional orbit." American Journal of Mathematics 82, no. 4 (1960): 698–748. doi:10.2307/2372936
• with Samuel Pasiencier: "Commutators in a semi-simple Lie group." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 13, no. 6 (1962): 907–913. MR 0169947
• "On the deformations of lattice in a Lie group." American Journal of Mathematics 85, no. 2 (1963): 189–212. doi:10.2307/2373209
• with W. M. Boothby and Shoshichi Kobayashi: "A note on mappings and automorphisms of almost complex manifolds." Annals of Mathematics (1963): 329–334. doi:10.2307/1970219
• "A remark on co-compactness of transformation groups." American Journal of Mathematics 95, no. 4 (1973): 885–903. doi:10.2307/2373700

References

1. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hsien Chung Wang", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
2. "Hsien Chung Wang 1918–1978, Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement" (PDF). ecommons.cornell.edu.
3. Wang, H. C. "Some geometrical aspects of coset spaces of Lie groups." In Proc. Inter. Congress of Math, pp. 500–509. 1958.
4. John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Hsien Chung Wang
5. "Wang, Hsien Chung". Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Charles Scribner's Sons. 2008.