Academic contributions of Professor Guochun Wen*

Abstract

Guochun Wen was born in Hangzhou, China on September 29, 1930. He entered the Peking University to study mathematics in 1951 and completed his graduation through the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics in 1959. He has been a professor of mathematics at Peking University since 1985. Prof. Wen has been engaged in teaching and researching the function theoretic methods for partial differential equations and their applications. He has supervised 20 students with MS or PhD degrees and published 220 papers and 21 books. His research work has led to the establishment of a systematical theory of nonlinear elliptic, parabolic, hyperbolic, and mixed (elliptic–hyperbolic) type complex equations and the corresponding theory in higher-dimensional domains, and solutions to some classical free boundary problems in nonlinear mechanics. Prof. Wen has extensive collaboration with researchers worldwide and has been invited to visit various institutions, including the Free University Berlin, Germany, the University of Delaware, USA, the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Moscow, the Nihon University, Tokyo, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Center of Theoretical Physics Research, Trieste, Italy, the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, the Gent University, Belgium, and the Technical University of Graz, Austria. Besides his teaching and research activities, Prof. Wen devoted much of his time to the service activities of mathematics, both nationally and internationally. He is a part-time professor of five universities in China and has been leading research in mathematics at ten universities. From 1985 to 1990, he joined the Yantai University, China and served as the chairman of the Mathematics Department, and later on as the director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the university. Since 1982, he is a member of the editorial board of the international journal “Complex Variables, Theory and Applications”, and a reviewer of Mathematical Reviews of the American Mathematical Society. He was a main organizer of the first national conference on “Integral Equations and Boundary Value Problems” in China and of the international conferences on the same subject in Beijing in 1990 and 1999. Prof. Wen was the recipient of the Second-class and Third-class Science Progress Awards of the Ministry of Education of China in 1987 and 1992, respectively, and the recipient of the First-class Science Progress Award of Beijing City in 2001. Dedicated to Professor Guochun Wen on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Prof. Wen's broad research interests include complex analysis, singular integral equations, linear and nonlinear elliptic equations and systems, quasi-conformal mappings, linear and nonlinear parabolic equations and systems, Clifford analysis, free and moving boundary problems in continuum mechanics, numerical analysis for elliptic complex equations, linear and quasi-linear complex equations of hyperbolic and mixed type with and without parabolic degeneracy. His research results may be divided into eight categories.