Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng (Chinese: 程之寧; born 6 June 1979,

Taipei Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the ...

) is a Taiwanese-born and Dutch-educated mathematician and theoretical physicist who works as an assistant professor at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bein ...

.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2016-08-02. She is known for formulating the

umbral moonshine In mathematics, umbral moonshine is a mysterious connection between Niemeier lattices and Ramanujan's mock theta functions. It is a generalization of the Mathieu moonshine phenomenon connecting representations of the Mathieu group M24 with K ...

conjectures and for her work on the connections between

K3 surface In mathematics, a complex analytic K3 surface is a compact connected complex manifold of dimension 2 with trivial canonical bundle and irregularity zero. An (algebraic) K3 surface over any field means a smooth proper geometrically connected ...

s and string theory..

Early life

Cheng grew up in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...

, where she was first interested in literature. At around twelve years old, she was interested in music, including pop music, rock, and punk. Because the material at her school was too easy, she skipped two years and got moved to a special class. The competitiveness and stress that came from school caused her to drop out and leave her parents' home to work at a record store and play in a punk rock band at the age of 16. Despite not completing high school, she was able to enter university through a program for gifted science students that she had gone through.

Education

After graduating from the Department of Physics at

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 during Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imper ...

in 2001, she moved to the Netherlands to continue her studies, and earned a master's degree in theoretical physics in 2003 from

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollm ...

, under the supervision of Nobel laureate

Gerard 't Hooft Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating th ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 2008 from the

under the joint supervision of

Erik Verlinde Erik Peter Verlinde (; born 21 January 1962) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is the identical twin brother of physicist Herman Verlinde. The Verlinde formula, which is important in conformal field theory and topologi ...

and Kostas Skenderis. After postdoctoral study at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

and working as a researcher at

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

, she returned to Amsterdam in 2014, with a joint position in the Institute of Physics and

Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics The Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics (KdVI) is the institute for mathematical research at the University of Amsterdam. The KdVI is located in Amsterdam at the Amsterdam Science Park. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Alexander Schrijver, Nicolai Res ...

Work with the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture

Cheng, along with John Duncan of

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Res ...

and Jeffrey Harvey of the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, formulated the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture in 2012, providing evidence of 23 new moonshines. They postulated that for each of these moonshines, there is a string theory, in which the string states are counted by the mock modular forms and the finite group captures the model's symmetry. In reference to the string theory underlying umbral moonshine, Cheng said that “it suggests that there’s a special symmetry acting on the physical theory of K3 surfaces.”

References

External links

Home page
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cheng, Miranda C. N. 1979 births Living people 21st-century Dutch mathematicians 21st-century Dutch women Dutch women mathematicians 21st-century Dutch physicists Dutch women physicists Scientists from Taipei Utrecht University alumni University of Amsterdam alumni Academic staff of the University of Amsterdam Taiwanese emigrants to the Netherlands 21st-century women mathematicians