Topic： On Topology

Speaker: Academician Fang Fuquan

Date: Thursday, March 28, 2019

Time: 16:15-17:30

Venue: Governing Board Meeting Room, Dao Yuan Building

Language: Chinese
 

        Speaker Profile

        Academician Fang Fuquan currently serves as the Vice-President of Capital Normal University. He was elected as a Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) in 2017 and a Fellow to the World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS) in 2018. He has taken the lead in projects funded by the “Key Program” or the “Science Fund for Creative Research Groups” of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and those supported by the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University of Ministry of Education of China. He was awarded the “Outstanding Young Scholar Award” in 1998 by the “Qiu Shi Science & Technologies Foundation” (Hong Kong), and received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 1999. He was awarded the National Natural Science Award of China (Second Prize) in 2014.

        Academician Fang Fuquan’s mathematical works focus on geometry and topology of manifolds. He has published more than 50 papers in top mathematics journals such as Acta Math, Invent, Math, and Topology. In his earlier career, Academician Fang solved a long-standing open problem on “orientable 4-manifolds topologically embed into R7”. Joint with X. Rong, Academician Fang obtained the “finiteness theorem for manifolds with positive pinched sectional curvature” and gave a negative answer to Grove’s question in all dimensions. Their research has been recognized by foreign experts, and was selected as a section titled "Fang-Rong Method" into the graduate student's textbook series at Oxford University. In Academician Fang’s work with foreign mathematicians, the famous Tits building theory has been applied in the clarification of positive curvature manifold for the first time. A complete topological classification is also obtained in this research.
 

        Abstract

        Topology, sometimes referred to as “rubber-sheet geometry”, is a crucial subject in mathematics studies and is also common in physics, chemistry, and biology. David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 for their "theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". Furthermore, topology also plays an important role in economics, cyberspace and other fields. In this lecture, Academician Fang will briefly introduce the origin and connotation of topology.