Wu-Chung Hsiang

The native form of this personal name is Hsiang Wu-chung. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Wu-Chung Hsiang
項武忠
Wu in 1975
Born	(1935-06-12) June 12, 1935 Wenzhou, Zhejiang
Education	National Taiwan University (BS) Princeton University (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Topology
Institutions	Yale University Princeton University
Thesis	Obstructions to sectioning fibre bundles  (1962)
Doctoral advisor	Norman Steenrod
Doctoral students	Ruth Charney, F. Thomas Farrell, Thomas Goodwillie, Michael W. Davis, Lowell E. Jones

Wu-Chung Hsiang (Chinese: 項武忠; pinyin: Xiàng Wǔzhōng; Wade–Giles: Hsiang Wu-chung; born 12 June 1935) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician, specializing in topology. Hsiang served as chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University from 1982 to 1985 and was one of the most influential topologists of the second half of the 20th century.

Early life and education

Hsiang was born in China in Wenzhou, Zhejiang. His father was a Kuomintang official under Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, he moved with his family to Taiwan during the Great Retreat.

Huang graduated in 1957 with his bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University and completed graduate studies in mathematics in the United States at Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. under Norman Steenrod in 1963. His doctoral thesis was titled, "Obstructions to sectioning fibre bundles".

Academic career

At Yale University he became in 1962 a lecturer, in 1963 an assistant professor, and in 1968 a full professor. At Princeton University he was a full professor from 1972 until retiring in 2006 as professor emeritus and was the department chair from 1982 to 1985. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic years 1965–1966, 1971–1972, and 1979–1980. He was a visiting professor at the University of Warwick in 1966, the University of Amsterdam in 1969, the University of Bonn in 1971, the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Stanford University in 1980.

Hsiang has made important contributions to algebraic and differential topology. Works by Hsiang, Julius Shaneson, C. T. C. Wall, Robion Kirby, Laurent Siebenmann and Andrew Casson led in the 1960s to the proof of the annulus theorem (previously known as the annulus conjecture). The annulus theorem is important in the theory of triangulation of manifolds.

With F. Thomas Farrell he worked on a program to prove the Novikov conjecture and the Borel conjecture with methods from geometric topology and gave proofs for special cases. For example, they gave a proof of the integral Novikov conjecture for compact Riemannian manifolds with non-positive sectional curvature. Hsiang also made contributions to the topological study of simply-connected 4-manifolds.

From 1967 to 1969 he was a Sloan Fellow and for the academic year 1975–1976 a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1980 he was elected a member of Academia Sinica. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1970 in Nice, with a talk on Differentiable actions of compact connected Lie groups on $R^{n}$ and a Plenary Speaker in 1983 in Warsaw, with a talk on Geometric applications of algebraic K-theory. In 2005 there was a conference at Stanford University in honor of his 70th birthday.

His doctoral students include Ruth Charney, F. Thomas Farrell, Thomas Goodwillie, Michael W. Davis, and Lowell E. Jones.