Early life
Cheng grew up in Taiwan, where she was first interested in literature. At around twelve years old, she was interested in music, including pop music, rock, and punk. Because the material at her school was too easy, she skipped two years and got moved to a special class. The competitiveness and stress that came from school caused her to drop out and leave her parents' home to work at a record store and play in a punk rock band at the age of 16. Despite not completing high school, she was able to enter university through a program for gifted science students that she had gone through.Education
After graduating from the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University in 2001, she moved to the Netherlands to continue her studies, and earned a master's degree in theoretical physics in 2003 from Utrecht University, under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft. She completed her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Amsterdam under the joint supervision of Erik Verlinde and Kostas Skenderis. After postdoctoral study at Harvard University and working as a researcher at CNRS, she returned to Amsterdam in 2014, with a joint position in the Institute of Physics and Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics.Work with the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture
Cheng, along with John Duncan of Case Western Reserve University and Jeffrey Harvey of the University of Chicago, formulated the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture in 2012, providing evidence of 23 new moonshines. They postulated that for each of these moonshines, there is a string theory, in which the string states are counted by the mock modular forms and the finite group captures the model's symmetry. In reference to the string theory underlying umbral moonshine, Cheng said that “it suggests that there’s a special symmetry acting on the physical theory of K3 surfaces.”References
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