Wei-Liang Chow

Zhou Weiliang (simplified Chinese: 周炜良; traditional Chinese: 周煒良; pinyin: Zhōu Wěiliáng; Wade–Giles: Chou Weiliang; October 1, 1911, Shanghai – August 10, 1995, Baltimore) was a Chinese mathematician born in Shanghai, known for his work in algebraic geometry.

Biography

Chow was a student in the USA, graduating from the University of Chicago in 1931. In 1932 he attended the University of Göttingen, then transferring to Leipzig where he worked with van der Waerden. They produced a series of joint papers on intersection theory, introducing in particular the use of what are now generally called Chow coordinates (which were in some form familiar to Arthur Cayley).

He married Margot Victor in 1936, and took a position at the National Central University in Nanjing. His mathematical work was seriously affected by the wartime situation in China. He taught at the National Tung-Chi University in Shanghai in the academic year 1946–47, and then went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he returned to his research. From 1948 to 1977 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

He was also a stamp collector, known for his book "Shanghai Large Dragons, The First Issue of The Shanghai Local Post", published in 1996.

See also

• Chow ring
• Chow's theorem
• Chow's moving lemma
• Chow's lemma gives the relation between proper and projective morphisms of schemes
• Chow-Rashevskii theorem

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Wei-Liang Chow", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• Wei-Liang Chow - memoriam in the Notices of the AMS, with contributions from S. S. Chern, Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar, Serge Lang, and Jun-ichi Igusa.
• Wei-Liang Chow at the Mathematics Genealogy Project