Wu Chung Hsiang

Wu-Chung Hsiang (born 12 June 1935 in Zhejiang) is a Chinese-American mathematician, specializing in topology.

Hsiang received in 1957 his bachelor's degree from the National Taiwan University and in 1963 his Ph.D. under Norman Steenrod from Princeton University with thesis Obstructions to sectioning fibre bundles. At Yale University he became in 1962 a lecturer, in 1963 an assistant professor, and in 1968 a full professor. At Princeton University he was a full professor from 1972 until retiring in 2006 as professor emeritus and was the department chair from 1982 to 1985. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic years 1965–1966, 1971–1972, and 1979–1980. He was a visiting professor at the University of Warwick in 1966, the University of Amsterdam in 1969, the University of Bonn in 1971, the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and MSRI and Stanford University in 1980.

Hsiang has made important contributions to algebraic and differential topology. Works by Hsiang, Julius Shaneson, C. T. C. Wall, Robion Kirby, Laurent Siebenmann and Andrew Casson lead in the 1960s to the proof of the annulus theorem (previously known as the annulus conjecture). The annulus theorem is important in the theory of triangulation of manifolds.

With F. Thomas Farrell he worked on a program to prove the Novikov conjecture and the Borel conjecture with methods from geometric topology and gave proofs for special cases. For example, they gave a proof of the integral Novikof conjecture for compact Riemannian manifolds with non-positive sectional curvature.

From 1967 to 1969 he was a Sloan Fellow and for the academic year 1975–1976 a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1980 he was elected a member of Academia Sinica. He was at the ICM in 1970 in Nice an Invited Speaker with talk Differentiable actions of compact connected Lie group on R n and in 1983 in Warsaw a Plenary Speaker with talk Geometric applications of algebraic K-theory. In 2005 there was a conference at Stanford University in honor of his 70th birthday.

His doctoral students include F. Thomas Farrell, Lowell Edwin Jones, Ian Hambleton and Steven Weintraub.

Wu-chung Hsiang's brother is the mathematician Wu-Yi Hsiang.