On October 28, which marks the 113th anniversary of the birth of Professor Shiing-Shen Chern — one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century, the "father of global differential geometry", and the founder of Nankai Institute of Mathematics — Xiaonan Ma, an internationally renowned mathematician, was appointed as a full-time Chair Professor of Nankai University. This November he will set up courses including "Geometry on Complex Manifolds" at Chern Institute of Mathematics (CIM) .
Xiaonan Ma is primarily engaged in research on differential geometry, complex geometry and topology, with a particular focus on global analysis on manifolds and index theory. He is recognized as a leading figure in these areas among his peers. He has published over 70 academic papers and two monographs, including in top journals like Acta Mathematica and Inventiones Mathematicae. His contributions to the fields of eta invariants, Ray-Singer analytic torsion, elliptic genus, Bergman kernel, and geometric quantization have had broad and profound impacts. He was invited to give a 45-minute talk at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians and has received several international awards, including the 2006 Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize from Spain, the 2017 le Grand Prix "Sophie Germain" from the French Academy of Sciences, and the 2022 Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Prize from Germany.
Notably, Xiaonan Ma has strong ties with Nankai University. He previously collaborated with Weiping Zhang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor at the Chern Institute of Mathematics. In 2014, Acta Mathematica, a leading international mathematics journal, published a paper co-authored by Zhang and Ma. This work employed the idea of analytic localization to solve a conjecture on geometric quantization in non-compact spaces, which was proposed by Academician Michèle Vergne in her one-hour plenary talk at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians.
On October 28, the Vice President of Nankai University Chengming Bai met with Xiaonan Ma at CIM. Chengming Bai expressed a warm welcome to Xiaonan Ma for his joining, which is believed will further promote the development of Nankai's mathematics, and said that NKU will fully support the research work of the key disciplines and the talents by providing excellent working environment and conditions.
Xiaonan Ma said that what attracted him to NKU are the high reputation that Nankai's mathematics has long been enjoying worldwide, and the rich academic heritage and innovativeness of CIM. In the future, he will fully devote himself to his research and teaching work at NKU, set up cutting-edge courses and cultivate more mathematical talents, so as to contribute to the development of Nankai's mathematics.
As an important part of NKU's mathematics discipline, CIM has always been working on nurturing high-level mathematical talents and conducting high-level mathematical research. In recent years, NKU has been attaching great importance to the training and introduction of mathematical talents. By providing positions such as Chair Professor, many leading scholars at home and abroad were attracted to join, including Shaoming Guo, a 36-year-old scholar of harmonic analysis, who recently was also appointed as a full-time Chair Professor of Nankai University.
The meeting was also attended by Weiping Zhang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor at CIM, Xiangyu Zhou, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and some of the representatives participating in the 2024 Beijing-Tianjin Workshop on Geometry held at CIM.
(Resource: NKU News; translated by CIM)
