Bang-Yen Chen

On October 20–21, 2018, at the 1143rd Meeting of the American Mathematical Society held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the Special Sessions was dedicated to Bang-Yen Chen's 75th birthday. The volume 756 in the Contemporary Mathematics series, published by the American Mathematical Society, is dedicated to Bang-Yen Chen, and it includes many contributions presented in the Ann Arbor event. The volume is edited by Joeri Van der Veken, Alfonso Carriazo, Ivko Dimitrić, Yun Myung Oh, Bogdan Suceavă, and Luc Vrancken.

In 1993, Chen studied submanifolds of space forms, showing that the intrinsic sectional curvature at any point is bounded below in terms of the intrinsic scalar curvature, the length of the mean curvature vector, and the curvature of the space form. In particular, as a consequence of the Gauss equation, given a minimal submanifold of Euclidean space, every sectional curvature at a point is greater than or equal to one-half of the scalar curvature at that point. Interestingly, the submanifolds for which the inequality is an equality can be characterized as certain products of minimal surfaces of low dimension with Euclidean spaces.

Bang-Yen Chen is a Taiwanese mathematician who works mainly on differential geometry and related subjects. He was a University Distinguished Professor of Michigan State University from 1990 to 2012. After 2012 he became University Distinguished professor emeritus.

Bang-Yen Chen taught at Tamkang University between 1966 and 1968, and at the National Tsing Hua University in the academic year 1967–1968. After his doctoral years (1968-1970) at University of Notre Dame, he joined the faculty at Michigan State University as a research associate from 1970 to 1972, where he became associate professor in 1972, and full professor in 1976. He was presented with the title of University Distinguished Professor in 1990. After 2012 he became University Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Bang-Yen Chen (陳邦彦) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. He received his B.S. from Tamkang University in 1965 and his M.Sc. from National Tsing Hua University in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Notre Dame in 1970 under the supervision of Tadashi Nagano.