Wanxiong Shi (; 6 October 1963 - 30 September 2021) was a Chinese mathematician. He was known for his fundamental work in the theory of

Ricci flow In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow ( , ), sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analo ...

Education

Shi was a native of

Quanzhou Quanzhou, postal map romanization, alternatively known as Chinchew, is a prefecture-level city, prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, China. It is Fujian's largest metrop ...

Fujian Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capi ...

. In 1978, Shi graduated from Quanzhou No. 5 Middle School, and entered the

University of Science and Technology of China A university () is an educational institution, institution of higher education, higher (or Tertiary education, tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. Universities ty ...

. Shi earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1982, then he went to the Institute of Mathematics of

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); ), known by Academia Sinica in English until the 1980s, is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for natural sciences. It has historical origins in the Academia Sinica during the Republ ...

and obtained his master's degree in mathematics in 1985 under the guidance of Lu Qikeng () and Zhong Jiaqing (). Then Shi was recruited by

Shing-Tung Yau Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathem ...

to study under him at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

. In 1987, Shi followed Yau to

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1990. Since Shi was stronger in

geometric analysis Geometric analysis is a mathematical discipline where tools from differential equations, especially elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), are used to establish new results in differential geometry and differential topology. The use of l ...

than other Chinese students, having an impressive ability to carry out highly technical arguments, he was assigned by Yau to investigate Ricci flow in the challenging case of noncompact

manifolds In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a Ne ...

. Shi made significant breakthroughs and was highly regarded by researchers in the field. Richard Hamilton, the founder of Ricci flow theory, liked his work very much.

Academic career and later life

Upon his graduation, several prominent universities were interested in offering him a faculty position. Hung-Hsi Wu () from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

asked Yau if Shi could come to Berkeley. Without seeking opinion from Yau, Shi applied to and got tenure track assistant professorship offers from the

, where Richard Hamilton was working at, and

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. Shi decided to join Purdue University. He published several important papers there, and was awarded three grants from the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

in 1991, 1994 and 1997. However, Shi did not pass the tenure review in 1997, so he had to leave the university. (The principal investigator of the NSF grant of 1997 was changed because of this.) Yau believes that the failure was due to the faculty members not realising the importance of Ricci flow theory. Hamilton sent a belated reference letter to Purdue University in which he rebuked the decision, but to no avail. Shi then left academia and moved to Washington D.C., where he lived a frugal and secluded life in solitude, and had less and less contact with his friends. He turned down some offers from other universities. Yau and former classmates of Shi tried to persuade Shi and help him return to academia, but he rejected. Yau felt sorry for Shi's leaving academia, since among the four students of Yau who worked on Ricci flow, Shi had done the best work. Shi died from a sudden heart attack in the evening of September 30, 2021.

Work

Shi initiated the study of Ricci flow theory on noncompact complete manifolds. He proved local derivative estimates for the Ricci flow, which are fundamental to many arguments of the theory, including

Perelman Perelman ( he, פרלמן) is an Ashkenazi Jewish surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Bob Perelman (b. 1947), American poet * Chaim Perelman (1912-1984), Polish-born Belgian philosopher of law * Eliezer Ben-Yehuda () (1858-1922), ...

's proof of the

Poincaré conjecture In the mathematics, mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture (, , ) is a theorem about the Characterization (mathematics), characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dim ...

using Ricci flow in 2002.

Publications

* * * * * * * *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shi, Wanxiong 20th-century Chinese mathematicians Mathematicians from Fujian Differential geometers University of Science and Technology of China alumni Harvard University alumni Purdue University faculty