Gang Tian, Ph. D.
▎Director of Institute for Theoretical Sciences
Biography
TIAN Gang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, President of the Chinese Mathematical Society, Vice Chairman of the China Democratic League, Chair Professor at Peking University, Director of the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, and member of the International Mathematical Union Executive Committee. He received the 19th Alan Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation of the United States and the Oswald Veblen Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1990, and plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002.
TIAN Gang solved a series of fundamentally important problems in geometry and mathematical physics. Most notably, he did pioneer work in the study of Kähler-Einstein metrics, introduced the notion of K-stability, and proved the existence of Kähler-Einstein metric on K-stable Fano manifolds. With collaborators, he established the mathematical foundation of quantum cohomology, constructed the Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic manifolds, and solved the non-degenerate case of the Arnold conjecture in symplectic geometry. He made outstanding contributions to the mathematical theory of higher dimensional gauge fields and discovered the deep connection between self-dual Yang-Mills connections and calibrated geometry. He also initiated the analytic minimal model program which uses methods from geometric analysis to study birational geometry and together with others, made substantial progress. More recently, he made very important contributions to the geometric analysis of low dimensional manifolds and various types of curvature flows.
