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THE LEAD

Fan-Rong King Chung Graham (Chinese: 金芳蓉; pinyin: Jīn Fāngróng; born October 9, 1949), known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in graph theory. Since 1998, Chung has been the Paul Erdős Professor in Combinatorics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international journals.

Education and career

Under the influence of her father, an engineer, she became interested in mathematics, especially in the area of combinatorics while still in high school in Kaohsiung.

After high school, Chung entered the National Taiwan University (NTU) to start her career in mathematics formally. While Chung was an undergraduate, she was surrounded by many female mathematicians, and this helped encourage her to pursue and study mathematics.

In 1970 Chung got a B.S. in mathematics from Universidad Nacional de Taiwán (NTU) and then emigrated to the United States for her graduate studies. She applied at the Universidad de Pensilvania (Penn) and got the highest score ever in the qualifying exam. This caught the attention of Herbert Wilf, who would later become her doctoral advisor. Wilf suggested teoría de Ramsey as a subject Chung could work on. During a single week studying it, Chung came up with new proofs for established results in the field. Wilf said: "My eyes were bulging. I was very excited. I asked her to go to the blackboard and show me. What she wrote was incredible! In just one week, from a cold start, she had proved a major result in teoría de Ramsey. I told her she had just done two-thirds of a doctoral dissertation."​

In 1972, Chung earned her M.S. from Penn, followed by the completion of her Ph.D. in 1974. Her doctoral thesis, titled "Ramsey Numbers in Multi-Colors and Combinatorial Designs," was supervised by Wilf.​

By this time, she was married and had given birth to her first child.

In 1974 she started working for Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where she worked under Henry Pollak. While at Bell Labs she met her future husband Ronald Graham. In 1975, Chung published the first of many joint papers on graph theory with Graham, On multicolor Ramsey numbers for complete bipartite graphs.​

In 1990, she was one of the first to receive a Bellcore university fellowship, a sabbatical she spent at Universidad de Harvard.

In 1990, she was one of the first to receive a Bellcore university fellowship, a sabbatical she spent at Harvard university.

In 1994 she resigned from Bellcore and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. That same year she was invited to give a lecture at the Congreso Internacional de Matemáticos.

She then returned to Penn and became Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science in 1995. She was the first female tenured professor in mathematics at that institution.

In 1997, the American Mathematical Society published Chung's book Spectral graph theory. This book became a key text in the study of Spectral graph theory. Chung's treatment of spectral graph theory brings the “algebraic connectivity” of graphs into a new and higher level.​

In 1998 she was named Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Universidad de California en San Diego (UCSD) where she became the Paul Erdős Professor in Combinatorics.

In 2003 she became the editor-in-chief of Internet Mathematics.

In 2008 she gave the plenary lecture on the mathematics of PageRank at theAnnual meeting of the American Mathematical Society.

In 2009 she was selected to be a conferenciante Noether.

In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.​

In 2017 Chung's life was profiled in the documentary film Girls who fell in love with Math.​

Personal life

Fan Chung, su marido Ronald Graham, y Paul Erdős, Japón, 1986

Fan Chung was born on October 9, 1949, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Chung tiene dos hijos; el primero nació durante sus estudios de posgrado, fruto de su primer matrimonio..​​

Personal life

Fan Chung's first marriage ended in divorce in 1982.

While working at Bell Laboratories, she met Ronald Graham, eventually marrying in 1983. She was married to him until his death in 2020. Regarding her marriage with Graham, Chung said:

Many mathematicians would hate to marry someone in the profession. They fear their relationship would be too competitive. In our case, not only are we both mathematicians, we both do work in the same areas. So we can understand and appreciate what the other is working on, and we can work on things together and sometimes make good progress.[10] [In Paul Hoffman's book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, ]

Both Chung and Graham were close friends of the mathematician Paul Erdős, and both published papers with him Thus, both have Erdős numbers of one. In 1998, Graham and Chung co-wrote the book Erdős on Graphs.[4]

Chung has two children; the first child was born during her graduate studies from her first marriage.[9][1]

Later career

[4]

spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution (including power-law graphs in the study of large information networks).

In 1983 the Bell Telephone Company was split up. Since Pollak joined and became head of a research unit within a new company, he asked Chung to become Research Manager. She supervised many mathematicians in the unit.

Usually with positions in management you obtain more influence and you certainly have more power to make decisions. But I do not want people to respect me because of that power. I'd rather win their admiration because of the mathematics I'm doing.

— Fan Chung, in Donald J. Albers, Making Connections: A Profile of Fan Chung, Math Horizons, September 1995, 14–18[3] In 1990, she was one of the first to receive a Bellcore university fellowship, a sabbatical she spent at Harvard university.

Beyond her contributions to graph theory, Chung has used her knowledge to connect different fields of science. As she wrote in "Graph Theory in the Information Age",

“In the past decade, graph theory has gone through a remarkable shift and a profound transformation. The change is in large part due to the humongous amount of information that we are confronted with. A main way to sort through massive data sets is to build and examine the network formed by interrelations. For example, Google’s successful Web search algorithms are based on the WWW graph, which contains all Web pages as vertices and hyperlinks as edges. There are all sorts of information networks, such as biological networks built from biological databases and social networks formed by email, phone calls, instant messaging, etc., as well as various types of physical networks. Of particular interest to mathematicians is the collaboration graph, which is based on the data from Mathematical Reviews. In the collaboration graph, every mathematician is a vertex, and two mathematicians who wrote a joint paper are connected.”[5] Chung's life was profiled in the 2017 documentary film Girls who fell in love with Math.[6]

Chung was an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Council member at large.[8]

more? Personal life

Research Chung has published more than 200 research papers and three books:

Erdős on Graphs: His Legacy of Unsolved Problems (with Ron Graham), A K Peters, Ltd., 1998, ISBN 1-56881-079-2[12] Spectral Graph Theory (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 92), American Mathematical Society, 1997, ISBN 0-8218-0315-8 Complex Graphs and Networks (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 107 " (with Linyuan Lu), American Mathematical Society, 2006, ISBN 0-8218-3657-9 Spectral graph theory Among Fan Chung's publications, her contributions to spectral graph theory are important to this area of graph theory. From the first publications about undirected graphs to recent publications about directed graphs, Fan Chung creates the solid base in the spectral graph theory to the future graph theorist.

Spectral graph theory, as one of the most important theories in graph theory, combines the algebra and graph perfectly. Historically, algebraic methods treat many types of graphs efficiently. Her work initiated a geometric approach to spectral graph theory with connections to differential geometry. According to the biography Fan Rong K Chung Graham, "Spectral graph theory studies how the spectrum of the Laplacian of a graph is related to its combinatorial properties.".

In 1997, the American Mathematical Society published Chung's book Spectral graph theory. This book became a standard textbook at many universities and is the key to study Spectral graph theory for many mathematics students who are interested in this area. Fan Chung's study in the spectral graph theory brings this “algebraic connectivity” of graphs into a new and higher level.[4]

Network science Fan Chung's work in random graph models shed new light on the field of network science. Many real-world large information networks (such as Internet Graphs, Call Graphs, and Collaboration Graphs, etc.) have been observed to be well approximated by a power law distribution. Fan Chung's work in the Chung-Lu model, pioneered the theory of treating random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions, including the power law graphs. Her work provides a solid framework for quantitative and rigorous analysis for modeling and analyzing large complex networks. It also often serves as a popular benchmark for comparing new graph models in network science.

In 2006, the American Mathematics Society and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences co-published Fan Chung and Linyuan Lu's book Complex Graphs and Networks.[13] The book gave a well-structured exposition for using combinatorial, probabilistic, spectral methods as well as other new and improved tools to analyze real-world large information networks.

Quasi-random graphs Main article: Chung–Graham–Wilson theorem Fan Chung, together with Ronald Graham and Richard Wilson, introduced a strong notion of equivalence among graph properties through the control of error bounds and developed the theory of quasi-random graphs. In a series of research papers (with several coauthors), she showed that a large family of graph properties is equivalent in the sense that if a graph satisfies any one of the properties, it must satisfy all of them. The set of equivalent quasi-random properties includes a surprisingly diverse collection of properties, and therefore provides efficient methods for validating graph properties. Many (but not all) random graph properties are quasi-random. The notion of quasi-randomness has been extended to many other combinatorial structures, such as sequences, tournaments, hypergraphs and graph limits. In general, the theory of quasi-randomness gives a rigorous approach to 'random-like' or 'pseudorandom' alternatives.

Extremal graph theory A basic question in extremal graph theory is to find unavoidable patterns and structures in graphs with given density or distribution. A complementary problem is to find a smallest graph which contains every member of a given family of graphs as subgraphs. In a series of work with Paul Erdős, Chung determined the sizes and structures of unavoidable graphs and hypergraphs. With several coauthors, she also derived many elegant and surprising results on universal graphs. Her fundamental contributions in these areas of extremal graph theory have many applications in parallel computations.