Chuu-Lian Terng () is a Taiwanese-American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. Her research areas are

differential geometry Differential geometry is a Mathematics, mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of Calculus, single variable calculus, vector calculus, lin ...

and

integrable systems In mathematics, integrability is a property of certain dynamical systems. While there are several distinct formal definitions, informally speaking, an integrable system is a dynamical system with sufficiently many conserved quantities, or first ...

, with particular interests in completely integrable Hamiltonian

partial differential equations In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to how ...

and their relations to differential geometry, the geometry and topology of submanifolds in symmetric spaces, and the geometry of isometric actions.

Education and career

She received her B.S. from

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; zh, t=國立臺灣大學, poj=Kok-li̍p Tâi-oân Tāi-ha̍k, p=, s=) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. Founded in 1928 during Taiwan under J ...

in 1971 and her Ph.D. from

Brandeis University Brandeis University () is a Private university, private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. It is located within the Greater Boston area. Founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian, non-sectarian, coeducational university, Bra ...

in 1976 under the supervision of

Richard Palais Richard Sheldon Palais (born May 22, 1931) is an American mathematician working in differential geometry. Education and career Palais studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a B.A. in 1952, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1956. His Ph ...

, whom she later married. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

from 1976-1978, an assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

from 1978-1982, and was faculty at

Northeastern University Northeastern University (NU or NEU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded by the Boston Young Men's Christian Association in 1898 as an all-male instit ...

from 1982-2004. She was the first female assistant professor in mathematics at Princeton University. She is currently a professor emerita at the University of California at Irvine, which she joined in 2004. She also spent two years at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

(IAS) in Princeton and two years at the

Max-Planck Institute The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...

Bonn, Germany Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

. Terng has been an active member of the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

(AWM). She served as AWM President from 1995 to 1997, chaired the Julia Robinson Celebration of Women in Math Conference, which was held July 1–3, 1996, and chaired the Michler Prize and Travel/Mentoring Grant Committees.. Terng has served on the editorial boards of the Transactions of the AMS, the Taiwanese Journal of Mathematics, Communications of Analysis and Geometry, the Proceedings of the AMS, and the Journal of Fixed Point Theory and its Applications. In 1999, she was selected as the AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer. Her citation reads:

Her early research concerned the classification of
natural Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life. Although humans are part ...

vector bundle In mathematics, a vector bundle is a topological construction that makes precise the idea of a family of vector spaces parameterized by another space X (for example X could be a topological space, a manifold, or an algebraic variety): to eve ...
s and natural
differential operator In mathematics, a differential operator is an operator defined as a function of the differentiation operator. It is helpful, as a matter of notation first, to consider differentiation as an abstract operation that accepts a function and retur ...
s between them. She then became interested in
submanifold In mathematics, a submanifold of a manifold M is a subset S which itself has the structure of a manifold, and for which the inclusion map S \rightarrow M satisfies certain properties. There are different types of submanifolds depending on exactly ...
geometry. Her main contributions are developing a structure theory for isoparametric submanifolds in $\mathbb^n$ and constructing
soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton is a nonlinear, self-reinforcing, localized wave packet that is , in that it preserves its shape while propagating freely, at constant velocity, and recovers it even after collisions with other such local ...
equations from special submanifolds. Recently, Terng and
Karen Uhlenbeck Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W ...
(
University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...
) have developed a general approach to integrable PDEs that explains their hidden symmetries in terms of
loop group In mathematics, a loop group (not to be confused with a loop) is a group of loops in a topological group ''G'' with multiplication defined pointwise. Definition In its most general form a loop group is a group of continuous mappings from a ...
actions. She is co-author of the book Submanifold Geometry and Critical Point Theory and an editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry survey volume 4 on "Integrable systems". Professor Terng served as president of the
Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...
(AWM) from 1995 to 1997 and as Member-at-Large of the Council of the
American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
(AMS) from 1989 to 1992. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Theoretical Sciences in Taiwan, the Steering Committee of the
Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...
Park City Summer Institute, and the Editorial Board of the Transactions of the AMS.

In 2006, she was an Invited Speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

in Madrid. In 2011, she gave an AMS-MAA Invited Address at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans.

Honors

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 1980. * Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1997. * AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer in 1999 * Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

, 2012. * Fellow of the

, 2018 (inaugural class).

Recognition

With Sun-Yung Alice Chang,

Fan Chung Fan-Rong King Chung Graham (; born October 9, 1949), known professionally as Fan Chung, is a Taiwanese-born American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular i ...

, Winnie Li, Jang-Mei Wu, and Mei-Chi Shaw, Terng is one of a group of six women mathematicians from

called by

Shiing-Shen Chern Shiing-Shen Chern (; , ; October 26, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geome ...

"a miracle in Chinese history; the glory of the Chinese people".. Reprinted in . See in particular p. 70 of ''ICCM Notices'' o
pp. 243–244
of ''I, Mathematician''.

References

External links

Terng's Home Page
at University of California, Irvine. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Terng, Chuu-Lian Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Brandeis University alumni Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics National Taiwan University alumni Northeastern University faculty Princeton University faculty Sloan Research Fellows Taiwanese emigrants to the United States 20th-century Taiwanese mathematicians University of California, Berkeley faculty University of California, Irvine faculty Women mathematicians Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)