Transnational Mathematics and Movements: Shiing-shen Chern, Hua Luogeng, and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study from World War II to the Cold War

This paper reconstructs, based on American and Chinese primary sources, the visits of Chinese mathematicians Shiing-shen Chern 陈省身 (Chen Xingshen) and Hua Luogeng 华罗庚 (Loo-Keng Hua)4to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the United States in the 1940s, especially their interactions with Oswald Veblen and Hermann Weyl, two leading mathematicians at the IAS. It argues that Chern’s and Hua’s motivations and choices in regard to their transnational movements between China and the US were more nuanced and multifaceted than what is presented in existing accounts, and that socio-political factors combined with professional-personal ones to shape their decisions. The paper further uses their experiences to demonstrate the importance of transnational scientific interactions for the development of science in China, the US, and elsewhere in the twentieth century.