Founded in 1985, the Chern Institute of Mathematics (CIM) was led by Professor Shiing-Shen Chern, the founding director of the Institute until 1992 appointed by the Ministry of Education of China. The Theoretical Physics Division of the Institute was founded in 1986 by the Nobel Prize laureate Chen-Ning Yang.

CIM is an open research institute. Its goal is to push forward the development of pure and applied mathematics, promote mathematical research in China, and to improve communication among mathematicians. It follows the guideline proposed by Professor Chern: based at Nankai, serving the country, and embracing the world.

The Institute boasts an internationally recognized research team consisting of some permanent research members and numerous research fellows and postdoctoral research fellows. Among them are 4 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 3 fellows of the TWAS, and 7 Distinguished Young Scholars of the National Natural Science Foundation. Their research fields cover a wide range of subjects, including differential geometry, nonlinear analysis, symplectic geometry, combinatorics, dynamical systems, operator algebras, Lie theory, coding theory, cryptography, information theory, mathematical physics, theoretical physics and so on. The research team has obtained outstanding results and won various important international and domestic honors, awards and grants.

The Institute has organized many academic activities on various subjects and has trained a large number of young mathematicians. Through these efforts, CIM has made important contributions to the development of mathematics in China and the improvement of connections between the Chinese and the international mathematical communities. Now CIM has in place a Visiting Scholar Program which hosts visiting scholars around the world including a set number of mathematicians from the central and western regions and other less developed areas of China. More than 100 international and domestic scholars visit CIM through the program every year. On the other hand, CIM has established an annual Call for Proposals of Academic Activity Program in order to attract talented mathematicians in China and overseas to host conferences and workshops. About 10 large and medium-sized international academic conferences or workshops are held by CIM every year.

Theoretical Physics Division at CIM

The Theoretical Physics Division at CIM was founded in 1986 by Professor Chen-Ning Yang, who was invited by Professor Shiing-Shen Chern to direct the research. Currently there are three professors (including one member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) in this division. The main research interest is mathematical physics and its applications in physics, including quantum intergrable systems, Yang-Mills field theory, Yang-Baxter system, quantum groups, algebraic structures of correlation systems, Yangian, and knot theory. It hosts many conferences, such as the Conference of Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics and the Colloquium on Group-Theoretical Methods in Physics. More than 100 physicists and mathematicians around the world, such as M. Atiyah, F. Dyson, J. Wess and L. Faddeev, have visited the Theoretical Physics Division at CIM.