October 9, 1949 -
Fan Chung grew up in Kaochiung, Taiwan, the daughter of an engineer. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 with a thesis on "Ramsey Numbers in Multi-Colors" under the direction of Herbert Wilf. She worked for 20 years at Bell Labs and Bellcore in the area of combinatorics. In 1994 she returned to the University of Pennsylvania as the Class of 1965 Professor of Mathematics, then joined the faculty of the University of California at San Diego in 1998 as Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Chung has written over 200 papers in mathematics and is the author of two books on graph theory. Her research interests are in spectral graph theory, discrete geometry, algorithms and communication networks. She won the 1990 Allendoefer Award from the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of mathematical articles of expository excellence for her article "Steiner Trees on a Checkerboard", co-authored with Martin Gardner and her husband, Ronald L. Graham.
Fan Chung's Home Page
Photo Credit: Photograph used with permission of the photographer, Martin Griff, and Math Horizons