Tien-Yien Li
American mathematician (1945–2020)
Tien-Yien Li (Chinese: 李天岩; June 28, 1945 – June 25, 2020) was a Taiwanese mathematician. He was a University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. There, he spent 42 years and supervised 26 Ph.D. dissertations.
Early life and education
Li was born on June 28, 1945, in Sha County, Fujian Province, China. At age three, he was brought to Taiwan by his parents. He earned his B.S. in mathematics from National Tsing Hua University in 1968. Li received his doctorate in 1974 from University of Maryland under the guidance of James Yorke.
Academic career
Li joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at Michigan State University in 1976 and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1983. He retired as a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2018 after spending 42 years at the university. Li and his supervisor James Yorke published a paper in 1975 entitled Period three implies chaos, in which the mathematical term chaos was coined.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tien-Yien Li” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.