Ky Fan, the famous Chinese American Mathematician who's known to few Chinese people

Ky Fan (1914-2010) was a Chinese American mathematician whose accompolishments could be compared to other famous Chinese mathematicians such as Pao-Lu Hsu (1910-1970),   S. S. Chern (陈省身, 1911-2004, American mathematician and then retired in China) and L.K. Hua (华罗庚, 1910-1985). His research areas and interests were in more practical areas such as matrix theory and minimax theorems which have a lot of applications in economics and statistics. His story of not being able to return to China's Peking University to teach after the Second World War was very sad and unfortunate for China's mathematics developments, but on the other hand, it was exactly due to his stay in the US during the subsequent period that he became  a major player in modern mathematics as mathematics saw rapid developments in such areas such as game theory, statistics and operation research, in which Ky Fan made a lot of contributions following the footsteps of Jon von Neumann and Hermann Weyl. He was a student and collaborator of M Frechet and they co-authored a book in 1946: Introduction a la Topologie Combinatoire. (Its English translation was published in 1967 and recently reissued by Dover under the title: Invitation to Combinatorial Topology.)

Ky Fan's work was characterized by its wide influence in many areas, and was widely cited and studied by other researchers, see for example references 1, 2, 3. His results were quoted as classic theorems in many textbooks. His practical interests were probably maintained by his frequent visits during 1947-1960 to national laboratories such as the National Bureau of Standards, see ref.4.

Ky Fan was born in Hangzhou, China on September 19, 1914. He enrolled in Peking University in 1932, and received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 1936. Fan went to France in 1939 and received his D.Sc. under Frechet from the University of Paris in 1941. A member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1945 to 1947, he then joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame, eventually becoming full professor. In 1965, Fan became professor of mathematics at UC Santa Barbara, retiring in 1985.

Fan was elected an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan) in 1964. Fan served as the director of the Institute of Mathematics there from 1978 to 1984.

A short biography of Ky Fan is given in Ref.5. A nice Chinese article about him was written by his last student, ref.6.

1. Ky Fan Inequalities: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1108/1108.1467v2.pdf
2. On a Minimax Inequality of Ky Fan. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2046475
3. On the Ky Fan Inequality and Related Inequalities II. http://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Bulletin/V72P1/pdf/721-5068-NeSa.pdf
4. Some Metric Inequalities in the Space of Matrices. http://www.ams.org/journals/proc/1955-006-01/S0002-9939-1955-0067841-7/S0002-9939-1955-0067841-7.pdf
5. Every Waking Moment Ky Fan (1914-2010): http://www.ams.org/notices/201011/rtx101101444p.pdf
6. 记恩师樊畿教授 http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-05-17/110213011025.shtml