Fan Chung

Since 1998, Chung has been the Paul Erdős Professor in Combinatorics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, under the direction of Herbert Wilf. After working at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore for nineteen years, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the first female tenured professor in mathematics. She serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international journals. Since 2003 she has been the editor-in-chief of Internet Mathematics. She has been invited to give lectures at many conferences, including the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994 and a plenary lecture on the mathematics of PageRank at the 2008 Annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. She was selected to be a Noether Lecturer in 2009. In 2024, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Fan Chung was born on October 9, 1949, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Under the influence of her father, an engineer, she became interested in mathematics, especially in the area of combinatorics 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.

After graduating from NTU with a B.S. in mathematics, Chung went on to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a career in mathematics. There she obtained the highest score in the qualifying exam by a wide margin, catching the attention of Herbert Wilf, who would eventually become her doctoral advisor. Wilf suggested Ramsey theory as a subject Chung could work on. During a single week studying material Chung had come 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 a major result in Ramsey theory. I told her she had just done two-thirds of a doctoral dissertation."

Chung earned a M.S. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1974. By this time, she was married and had already given birth to her first child. After receiving her Ph.D., she began working for the Mathematical Foundations of Computing Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The position at Bell Laboratories was an opportunity to work with other mathematicians. She has published many mathematical papers that are considered impressive, and published many joint papers with Ronald Graham.

Bell Laboratories

In 1974, Fan Chung graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and became a Member of Technical Staff working for the Mathematical Foundations of Computing Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. She worked under Henry Pollak. During this time, Chung collaborated with many leading mathematicians who worked for Bell Laboratories.

In 1975, Chung published her first joint paper with Graham, On multicolor Ramsey numbers for complete bipartite graphs, which was published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory (Series B).

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

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

Later career

After twenty years of work at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore, Chung decided to go back to the University of Pennsylvania to become a professor of mathematics. In 1998, she was named Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego.

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.”

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

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

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

Personal life

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

Fan Chung's first marriage ended in divorce in 1982. However, when she worked at Bell Laboratories, she met Ronald Graham. During that time, they became close friends and published many joint papers in graph theory, eventually marrying in 1983. She was married to him until his death in 2020.

In Paul Hoffman's book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, 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.

Both Chung and Graham were close friends of the mathematician Paul Erdős, and have both published papers with him – 13 in her case; thus, both have Erdős numbers of one. In 1998, Graham and Chung co-wrote the book Erdős on Graphs.