Wanxiong Shi (; 6 October 1963 - 30 September 2021) was a Chinese mathematician. He was known for his fundamental work in the theory of

Ricci flow In differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow ( , ), sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion o ...

Education

Shi was a native of

Quanzhou Quanzhou is a prefecture-level city, prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, China, People's Republic of China. It is Fujian's largest most populous metropolitan region, wi ...

Fujian Fujian is a provinces of China, province in East China, southeastern China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou and its largest prefe ...

. In 1978, Shi graduated from Quanzhou No. 5 Middle School, and entered the

University of Science and Technology of China The University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) is a public university in Hefei, China. It is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education of the People' ...

. Shi earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1982, then he went to the Institute of Mathematics of

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; ) is the national academy for natural sciences and the highest consultancy for science and technology of the People's Republic of China. It is the world's largest research organization, with 106 research i ...

and obtained his master's degree in mathematics in 1985 under the guidance of Lu Qikeng () and Zhong Jiaqing (). Then Shi was recruited by

Shing-Tung Yau Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar ...

to study under him at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

. In 1987, Shi followed Yau to

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1990. Since Shi was stronger in

geometric analysis Geometric analysis is a mathematical discipline where tools from differential equations, especially elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), are used to establish new results in differential geometry and differential topology. The use of ...

than other Chinese students, having an impressive ability to carry out highly technical arguments, he was assigned by Yau to investigate Ricci flow in the challenging case of noncompact

manifolds In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...

. Shi made significant breakthroughs and was highly regarded by researchers in the field. Richard Hamilton, the founder of Ricci flow theory, liked his work very much.

Academic career and later life

Upon his graduation, several prominent universities were interested in offering him a faculty position. Hung-Hsi Wu () from 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 ...

asked Yau if Shi could come to Berkeley. Without seeking opinion from Yau, Shi applied to and got tenure track assistant professorship offers from the

, where Richard Hamilton was working at, and

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

. Shi decided to join Purdue University. He published several important papers there, and was awarded three grants from the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party * National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political g ...

in 1991, 1994 and 1997. However, Shi did not pass the tenure review in 1997, so he had to leave the university. (The principal investigator of the NSF grant of 1997 was changed because of this.) Yau believes that the failure was due to the faculty members not realising the importance of Ricci flow theory. Hamilton sent a belated reference letter to Purdue University in which he rebuked the decision, but to no avail. Shi then left academia and moved to Washington D.C., where he lived a frugal and secluded life in solitude, and had less and less contact with his friends. He turned down some offers from other universities. Yau and former classmates of Shi tried to persuade Shi and help him return to academia, but he rejected. Yau felt sorry for Shi's leaving academia, since among the four students of Yau who worked on Ricci flow, Shi had done the best work. Shi died from a sudden heart attack in the evening of September 30, 2021.

Work

Shi initiated the study of Ricci flow theory on noncompact complete manifolds. He proved local derivative estimates for the Ricci flow, which are fundamental to many arguments of the theory, including Perelman's proof of the

Poincaré conjecture In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture (, , ) is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space. Originally conjectured b ...

using Ricci flow in 2002.

Publications

* * * * * * * *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shi, Wanxiong 20th-century Chinese mathematicians Mathematicians from Fujian Differential geometers University of Science and Technology of China alumni Harvard University alumni Purdue University faculty