Chung to Speak on The Mathematics of PageRank
Fan
Chung, University of California San Diego, will deliver a Joint AMS-MAA
Invited Address on Tuesday, January 8, 2008, 11:10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
She will speak on The mathematics of PageRank. This lecture
will be held in Room 6AB, San Diego Convention Center.
Listen
to Fan Chung talk with AMS Public Awareness Officer Mike Breen about
her address.
Fan Chung (Chinese name 
)
is the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at UC San Diego. As a
young high school student growing up in Kaoshiung, Taiwan in the sixties,
she knew that she would be a mathematician. Her engineer-father told her,
"in math all you need is pencil and paper." She graduated with
a B.S. in mathematics in 1970 at the National Taiwan University and then
went to the United States for her graduate studies. She entered the University
of Pennsylvania and was awarded an M.S. in 1972. Chung then continued
her studies for a Ph.D. with Herbert Wilf as her supervisor. In
1974, she graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Chung has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked at Bell Labs in its glory days, and directed some great research groups at Bellcore. She spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1994 before accepting a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. After three years as Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science at Pennsylvania she was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She also holds the Akamai Professorship in Internet Mathematics.
Her research interests are primarily in graph thoery, combinatorics and
algorithmic design. In particular, she is known for her work for initiating
and developing three fundamental areas in combinatorics: Spectral graph
theory, Random graphs with general degree distributions, and Quasi-randomness.
She has written over 240 papers and has about 120 coauthors. She has
written three books, Spectral Graph Theory, Complex Graphs and
Networks (coauthored with Lincoln Lu), and Erdös on
Graphs (coauthored with Ron Graham). She serves on the editorial
boards of a dozen or so journals. In 1990, she was awarded the Allendoerfer
Award by the Mathematical Association of America. Since 1998, she has
been a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.