Fan Chung

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Fan Chung bigraphy, stories - Mathematician

Fan Chung : biography

October 9, 1949 –

Fan Rong K Chung Graham (金芳蓉, pinyin: Jīn Fāngróng) (born October 9, 1949 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan), known professionally as Fan Chung, is a mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution (including power-law graphs in the study of large information networks).

Life

Since 1998 Chung has been the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, under the direction of Herbert Wilf. After working at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore for nineteen years, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the first female tenured professor in mathematics. She serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international journals. Since 2003 she has been the editor-in-chief of Internet Mathematics. She has given invited lectures in many conferences, including the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994, and a plenary lecture on the mathematics of PageRank at the 2008 Annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. She was selected to be a Noether Lecturer in 2009.

Fan Chung, her husband [[Ronald Graham, and Paul Erdős, Japan, 1986]] Chung has two children, the first born during her graduate studies, from her first marriage. Since 1983 she has been married to the mathematician Ronald Graham. They were close friends of the mathematician Paul Erdős, and have both published papers with him – 13 in her case;http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html thus, both have Erdős numbers of 1.

She has published more than 200 research papers and three books:

  • Erdős on Graphs: His Legacy of Unsolved Problems (with Ron Graham), A K Peters, Ltd., 1998, ISBN 1-56881-079-2
  • Spectral Graph Theory (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 92), American Mathematical Society, 1997, ISBN 0-8218-0315-8
  • Complex Graphs and Networks (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 107 " (with Linyuan Lu), American Mathematical Society, 2006, ISBN 0-8218-3657-9

In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society., retrieved 2012-11-10.

Fan Chung and Ron Graham

Unfortunately, Fan Chung’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1982. However, when Fan Chung works in the Bell Laboratories, she met with Ronald Graham. During that time, they become best friends and published a lot of joint papers in graph theory. The passion for mathematics brings them together, and Fan Chung married to Ron Graham in 1983. In P Hoffman’s book The man who loved only numbers, Graham talked about his marriage with Fan Chung. He said:
Many mathematicians would hate to marry someone in the profession. They fear their relationship would be too competitive. In our case, not only are we both mathematicians, we both do work in the same areas. So we can understand and appreciate what the other is working on, and we can work on things together and sometimes make good progress. Hoffman, P The man who loved only numbers London, 1998.
Fan Chung and Graham’s marriage as Graham said becomes one of the most important factors to help Fan Chung achieves higher level in the academic world and challenges more and more problems in the graph theory. In 1998, one of the most important book appears. Erdos on graphs was jointly written by Fan Chung and her husband Graham. Many problems in graph theory made by Paul Erdos are listed in this book. Even though many of the Erdos problems presented in the book would remains open for years, this book provides many challenges to the mathematicians who are interested in the field of graph theory.

Biography

Fan Chung was born in 9th Oct. 1949 in KaoShiong, Taiwan. Under the influence of engineer—father, Fan Chung started to be interested in mathematics especially in the area of combinatorics in high school in Kaoshiung. Once she gets into the problems of combinatorics, it is hard for her to get out. After high school, Fan Chung went to the National Taiwan University to start her career in mathematics formally. During Fan Chung’s undergraduate, she was surrounded by many women mathematicians. They talked about the mathematics and help each other. Seeing more and more women doing well in mathematics also encourages Fan Chung to study mathematics.