Pao Ming Pu (the form of his name he used in Western languages, although the Wade-Giles transliteration would be Pu Baoming; ; August 1910 – February 22, 1988), was a mathematician born in

Jintang County Jintang County is a county of Sichuan Province, China, it is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Chengdu, the provincial capital. Geography Jintang is bordered by the prefecture-level cities of Deyang to the north and east ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

.. He was a student of

Charles Loewner Charles Loewner (29 May 1893 – 8 January 1968) was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sig ...

and a pioneer of

systolic geometry In mathematics, systolic geometry is the study of systolic invariants of manifolds and polyhedra, as initially conceived by Charles Loewner and developed by Mikhail Gromov, Michael Freedman, Peter Sarnak, Mikhail Katz, Larry Guth, and others, ...

, having proved what is today called

Pu's inequality In differential geometry, Pu's inequality, proved by Pao Ming Pu, relates the area of an arbitrary Riemannian surface homeomorphic to the real projective plane with the lengths of the closed curves contained in it. Statement A student of Charle ...

for the real projective plane, following Loewner's proof of

Loewner's torus inequality In differential geometry, Loewner's torus inequality is an inequality due to Charles Loewner. It relates the systole and the area of an arbitrary Riemannian metric on the 2-torus. Statement In 1949 Charles Loewner proved that every metric on ...

. He later worked in the area of

fuzzy mathematics Fuzzy mathematics is the branch of mathematics including fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic that deals with partial inclusion of elements in a set on a spectrum, as opposed to simple binary "yes" or "no" (0 or 1) inclusion. It started in 1965 ...

. He spent much of his career as professor and chairman of the department of mathematics at Sichuan University.

Biography

Pu received his Ph.D. at

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

in 1950 under the supervision of

, resulting in the publication in 1952 of the seminal paper containing both Pu's inequality for the real projective plane and

. .99 The listing at the Mathematics Genealogy Project indicates that his first name, according to Syracuse University records, was ''Frank''. Pu returned to mainland China in February 1951. (Katz '07) suggests that Pu may have been forced to return to the mainland by the communist authorities, as there was apparently a wave of recalls of Chinese academics working in the West following

Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek (31 October 1887 – 5 April 1975), also known as Chiang Chung-cheng and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese Nationalist politician, revolutionary, and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 ...

's ouster from the mainland in 1949. After his return, Pu became a professor at Sichuan University in 1952. He served as head of the department of mathematics from 1952 to 1984. While he was apparently unable to supervise graduate students during most of his scientific career, he became one of the first group of supervisors for graduate students (bóshìshēng dǎoshī, ) at the age of 71, four years after the end of the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal ...

. Most of his later papers concern fuzzy topology.

Influence

According to Google Scholar, Pu's seminal article from 1952 is cited by at least 93 mathematical works, a high score by mathematical standards. His joint work with Liu in fuzzy topology ;
. continues to be cited frequently in current literature in fuzzy mathematics.

Biography

Influence

References

Further reading