Brief Introduction:

"Through his research work, personal interactions and collaborations with students and colleagues and service to our community, his contributions to and impact on our subject are unexcelled." said the distinguished American mathematician Professor Phillip A.Griffiths.

Professor Griffiths made observations about Professor Chern's contributions to the mathematical community from an academic aspect, mentioning Chern classes that are ubiquitous in mathematics and have influence in many diverse areas including differential geometry, topology and algebraic geometry; as well as other areas which bear Chern's name such as Chern-Simons invariants and Bott-Chern classes that have profound implications in physics and complex function theory.

Web geometry is a subject which has special meaning to Professor Griffiths. In Hamburg, Germany, Chern learned about webs from the renowned German mathematician Wilhelm Blaschke and the people around him, and he solved a problem posed by Blaschke. In the 1970s, Professor Chern and Professor Griffiths started their joint work on web geometry. Unintentionally, their research stimulated renewed interest in webs that is continuing today and has led to significant results.

(Above is the written speech that Professor Phillip A.Griffiths planned to deliver at CIM's Conference of Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Professor Shiing-Shen Chern.) 

Link to the Chinese translation: Chinese Translation.pdf

Phillip A.Griffiths is a distinguished American mathematician, Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton. He previously served as the Director of IAS and Secretary of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). He has won the Wolf Prize, the Leroy P. Steele Prize and the Chern Medal Award.