Goong Chen (born July 7, 1950, Kaohsiung,

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

) is an applied mathematician known for his use of computer forensics and computer simulation to recreate what may have occurred in

aviation accidents An aviation accident is defined by the Convention on International Civil Aviation Annex 13 as an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft, which takes place from the time any person boards the aircraft with the ''intention of f ...

. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Chen led an interdisciplinary team of researchers from

Texas A&M Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

, Penn State,

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six re ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute in using applied mathematics and computational fluid dynamics to conduct computer simulations of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s presumed descent into the ocean. In a paper published in April 2015, they concluded that the most likely scenario was that the plane entered the water at a vertical or steep angle, based on the lack of floating debris or oil spills. This finding was deemed a top math story of 2015 by the American Mathematical Society after widespread media coverage.

Khan Shaykhun chemical attack

Chen collaborated with

Theodore Postol Theodore A. Postol (born 1946) is a professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his work at MIT, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory, the Pentagon, and Stanford ...

on an

analysis Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...

of the April 4, 2017 chemical attack on

Khan Shaykhun Khan Shaykhun ( ar, خَان شَيْخُون, Ḵān Šayḵūn), sometimes spelled Khan Sheikhoun or Khan Shikhoun, is a town in the Maarrat al-Nu'man District, within the southern Idlib Governorate of northwestern Syria. Khan Shaykhun is locate ...

, Syria. The

OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism The United Nations Security Council adopted United Nations Security Council resolution 2235 (2015) on 7 August 2015, in response to use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War. The resolution condemned "any use of any toxic chemical, such as ch ...

had concluded that the Khan Shaykhun impact crater was caused by an aerial bomb dropped by a plane, but Chen’s simulations suggested that the crater could instead have been created by a 122 mm artillery rocket.

Smolensk air disaster

In 2019, Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office announced that it had appointed Chen to an international team of experts investigating the April 10, 2010 crash of a Polish Air Force jet near

Smolensk Smolensk ( rus, Смоленск, p=smɐˈlʲensk, a=smolensk_ru.ogg) is a city and the administrative center of Smolensk Oblast, Russia, located on the Dnieper River, west-southwest of Moscow. First mentioned in 863, it is one of the oldest ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...

in which Polish president

Lech Kaczyński Lech Aleksander Kaczyński (; 18 June 194910 April 2010) was a Polish politician who served as the city mayor of Warsaw from 2002 until 2005, and as President of Poland from 2005 until his death in 2010. Before his tenure as president, he pre ...

was killed.

Selected publications

With

Ranee Brylinski Ranee Kathryn Brylinski (née Gupta, born January 28, 1957) is an American mathematician known for her research in representation theory and quantum logic gates. Formerly a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, she left academi ...

, Chen is the editor of the book ''Mathematics of Quantum Computation'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2002).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chen, Goong Living people 1950 births 20th-century Taiwanese mathematicians 21st-century Taiwanese mathematicians Texas A&M University faculty