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Chen Bang-yen
陳邦彦
Born (1943-10-03) October 3, 1943 (age 80)
Toucheng, Yilan, Taiwan
NationalityTaiwanese, American
Alma materTamkang University, National Tsing Hua University, University of Notre Dame
Known for"Chen inequalities", "Chen invariants (or δ-invariants)", "Chen's conjectures", "Chen surface", "Chen–Ricci inequality", "Chen submanifold", "Chen equality", "Submanifolds of finite type", "Slant submanifolds", "(M+,M-)-method for compact symmetric spaces & 2-numbers of Riemannian manifolds (joint with Tadashi Nagano)".
ChildrenThree Children - Two Girls, One Boy
Scientific career
FieldsDifferential geometry, Riemannian Geometry, Geometry and topology
InstitutionsMichigan State University
ThesisOn the G-total curvature and topology of immersed manifolds
Doctoral advisorTadashi Nagano
Doctoral studentsBogdan Suceavă
Websitewww.researchgate.net/profile/Bang_Yen_Chen

Chen Bang-yen is a Taiwan-born mathematician who works mainly on differential geometry and related subjects. He was a University Distinguished Professor of Michigan State University from 1990 to 2012. After 2012 he became University Distinguished professor emeritus.

Biography

Chen Bang-yen (陳邦彦) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. He received his B.S. from Tamkang University in 1965 and his M.Sc. from National Tsing Hua University in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Notre Dame in 1970 under the supervision of Tadashi Nagano.[1][2]

Chen Bang-yen taught at Tamkang University between 1965 and 1968, and at the National Tsing Hua University in the academic year 1967–1968. After his doctoral years (1968-1970) at University of Notre Dame, he joined the faculty at Michigan State University as a research associate from 1970 to 1972, where he became associate professor in 1972, and full professor in 1976. He was presented with the title of University Distinguished Professor in 1990. After 2012 he became University Distinguished Professor Emeritus.[3] [4]

Chen Bang-yen is the author of over 560 works including 12 books, mainly in differential geometry and related subjects. He also co-edited four books, three of them were published by Springer Nature and one of them by American Mathematical Society.[5][6] His works have been cited over 36,000 times.[7]

On October 20–21, 2018, at the 1143rd Meeting of the American Mathematical Society held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the Special Sessions was dedicated to Chen Bang-yen's 75th birthday.[8] [9] The volume 756 in the Contemporary Mathematics series, published by the American Mathematical Society, is dedicated to Chen Bang-yen, and it includes many contributions presented in the Ann Arbor event.[10] The volume is edited by Joeri Van der Veken, Alfonso Carriazo, Ivko Dimitrić, Yun Myung Oh, Bogdan Suceavă, and Luc Vrancken.

Research contributions

Given an almost Hermitian manifold, a totally real submanifold is one for which the tangent space is orthogonal to its image under the almost complex structure. From the algebraic structure of the Gauss equation and the Simons formula, Chen and Koichi Ogiue derived a number of information on submanifolds of complex space forms which are totally real and minimal. By using Shiing-Shen Chern, Manfredo do Carmo, and Shoshichi Kobayashi's estimate of the algebraic terms in the Simons formula, Chen and Ogiue showed that closed submanifolds which are totally real and minimal must be totally geodesic if the second fundamental form is sufficiently small.[11] By using the Codazzi equation and isothermal coordinates, they also obtained rigidity results on two-dimensional closed submanifolds of complex space forms which are totally real.

In 1993, Chen studied submanifolds of space forms, showing that the intrinsic sectional curvature at any point is bounded below in terms of the intrinsic scalar curvature, the length of the mean curvature vector, and the curvature of the space form. In particular, as a consequence of the Gauss equation, given a minimal submanifold of Euclidean space, every sectional curvature at a point is greater than or equal to one-half of the scalar curvature at that point. Interestingly, the submanifolds for which the inequality is an equality can be characterized as certain products of minimal surfaces of low dimension with Euclidean spaces.

Chen introduced and systematically studied the notion of a finite type submanifold of Euclidean space, which is a submanifold for which the position vector is a finite linear combination of eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. He also introduced and studied a generalization of the class of totally real submanifolds and of complex submanifolds; a slant submanifold of an almost Hermitian manifold is a submanifold for which there is a number k such that the image under the almost complex structure of an arbitrary submanifold tangent vector has an angle of k with the submanifold's tangent space.

In Riemannian geometry, Chen and Kentaro Yano initiated the study of spaces of quasi-constant curvature. Chen also introduced the δ-invariants (also called Chen invariants), which are certain kinds of partial traces of the sectional curvature; they can be viewed as an interpolation between sectional curvature and scalar curvature. Due to the Gauss equation, the δ-invariants of a Riemannian submanifold can be controlled by the length of the mean curvature vector and the size of the sectional curvature of the ambient manifold. Submanifolds of space forms which satisfy the equality case of this inequality are known as ideal immersions; such submanifolds are critical points of a certain restriction of the Willmore energy.

Publications

Major articles

Surveys

Books

References

  1. ^ "Chen Bang-yen's Ph.D. thesis".
  2. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on Genealogy Project".
  3. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on MSU domain".
  4. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on Google Scholar".
  5. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on Zentralblatt".
  6. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on Research Gate".
  7. ^ "Chen Bang-yen on ResearchGate".
  8. ^ "American Mathematical Society, Meeting No. 1143".
  9. ^ "Notices of AMS" (PDF).
  10. ^ Contemporary Mathematics, Volume 756. Vol. 756. American Mathematical Society. 2020. doi:10.1090/conm/756. ISBN 9781470450922. S2CID 230645373.
  11. ^ S.S. Chern, M. do Carmo, and S. Kobayashi. Minimal submanifolds of a sphere with second fundamental form of constant length. 1970 Functional Analysis and Related Fields (Proc. Conf. for M. Stone, Univ. Chicago, Chicago, Ill., 1968) pp. 59–75 Springer, New York
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