Pao Ming Pu (; August 1910 – February 22, 1988), was a Chinese mathematician born in

Jintang County Jintang County is a county of the City of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, China. Geography Jintang is bordered by the prefecture-level cities of Deyang to the north and east and Jianyang to the south. History In the 19th century, Jintang County wa ...

Sichuan Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Cheng ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

.. He was a student of

Charles Loewner Charles Loewner (29 May 1893 – 8 January 1968) was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Early life and career Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prag ...

and a pioneer of

systolic geometry In mathematics, systolic geometry is the study of systolic invariants of manifolds and polyhedra, as initially conceived by Charles Loewner and developed by Mikhail Gromov, Michael Freedman, Peter Sarnak, Mikhail Katz, Larry Guth, and ...

, having proved what is today called

Pu's inequality In differential geometry, Pu's inequality, proved by Pao Ming Pu, relates the area of an arbitrary Riemannian surface homeomorphic to the real projective plane with the lengths of the closed curves contained in it. Statement A student of Char ...

for the

real projective plane In mathematics, the real projective plane, denoted or , is a two-dimensional projective space, similar to the familiar Euclidean plane in many respects but without the concepts of distance, circles, angle measure, or parallelism. It is the sett ...

, following Loewner's proof of

Loewner's torus inequality In differential geometry, Loewner's torus inequality is an inequality due to Charles Loewner. It relates the systole and the area of an arbitrary Riemannian metric on the 2-torus. Statement In 1949 Charles Loewner proved that every metric on t ...

. He later worked in the area of

fuzzy mathematics Fuzzy mathematics is the branch of mathematics including fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic that deals with partial inclusion of elements in a set on a spectrum, as opposed to simple binary "yes" or "no" (0 or 1) inclusion. It started in 1965 a ...

. He spent much of his career as professor and chairman of the department of mathematics at

Sichuan University Sichuan University (SCU) is a public university in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. The university is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. I ...

Biography

Pu received his Ph.D. at

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York, United States. It was established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church but has been nonsectarian since 1920 ...

in 1950 under the supervision of

, resulting in the publication in 1952 of the seminal paper containing both Pu's inequality for the real projective plane and

. .99 The listing at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. it contained information on 300,152 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematicia ...

indicates that his first name, according to Syracuse University records, was ''Frank''. Pu returned to mainland China in February 1951. (Katz '07) suggests that Pu may have been forced to return to the mainland by the communist authorities, as there was apparently a wave of recalls of Chinese academics working in the West following Chiang Kai-shek's ouster from the mainland in 1949. After his return, Pu became a professor at

in 1952. He served as head of the department of mathematics from 1952 to 1984. While he was apparently unable to supervise graduate students during most of his scientific career, he became one of the first group of supervisors for graduate students (bóshìshēng dǎoshī, ) at the age of 71, four years after the end of the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a Social movement, sociopolitical movement in the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his de ...

. Most of his later papers concern fuzzy topology.

Influence

According to Google Scholar, Pu's seminal article from 1952 is cited by at least 93 mathematical works, a high score by mathematical standards. His joint work with Liu in fuzzy topology ;
. continues to be cited frequently in current literature in fuzzy mathematics.

Biography

Influence

Notes

References

Further reading