Pao Ming Pu (the form of his name he used in Western languages, although the Wade-Giles transliteration would be Pu Baoming; ; August 1910 – February 22, 1988), was a mathematician born in Jintang County,

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

, China.. 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. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sig ...

and a pioneer of systolic geometry, 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 Charle ...

for the

real projective plane In mathematics, the real projective plane is an example of a compact non-orientable two-dimensional manifold; in other words, a one-sided surface. It cannot be embedded in standard three-dimensional space without intersecting itself. It has b ...

, following Loewner's proof of Loewner's torus inequality. He later worked in the area of fuzzy mathematics. He spent much of his career as professor and chairman of the department of mathematics at

Sichuan University Sichuan University (SCU) is a national key public research university in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. The university is wholly funded by the Ministry of Education. SCU is one of the top universities of China, and a Class A Double First Class Univer ...

Biography

Pu received his Ph.D. at Syracuse University 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 Loewner's torus inequality. .99 The listing at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

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 sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goa ...

. 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

References

Further reading