[13] At age 15, Chern entered the Faculty of Sciences of the Nankai University in Tianjin and was interested in physics, but not so much the laboratory, so he studied mathematics instead.

[14] Co-funded by Tsinghua and the Chinese Foundation of Culture and Education, Chern went to continue his study in mathematics in Germany with a scholarship.

In late 1937, however, the start of World War 2 forced Tsinghua and other academic institutions to move away from Beijing to west China.

[5] In July 1943, Chern went to the United States, and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton on characteristic classes in differential geometry.

[12] On Chern, Weil wrote:[19]... we seemed to share a common attitude towards such subjects, or towards mathematics in general; we were both striving to strike at the root of each question while freeing our minds from preconceived notions about what others might have regarded as the right or the wrong way of dealing with it.It was at the IAS that his work culminated in his publication of the generalization of the famous Gauss–Bonnet theorem to higher dimensional manifolds, now known today as the Chern theorem.

[3][12] In a letter to the then director Frank Aydelotte, Chern wrote:[12]“The years 1943–45 will undoubtedly be decisive in my career, and I have profited not only in the mathematical side.

[18][2] Coincidentally, Ernest Preston Lane, former Chair at UChicago Department of Mathematics, was the doctoral advisor of Chern's undergraduate mentor at Tsinghua—Sun Guangyuan.

[22][23] In 1981, together with colleagues Calvin C. Moore and Isadore Singer, he founded the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley, serving as the director until 1984.

Chern was largely responsible in making the US a leading research hub in the field, but he remained modest about his achievements, preferring to say that he is a man of 'small problems' rather than 'big views.

Because of foreign prestigious scientific support, Chern was able to revive mathematical research in China, producing a generation of influential Chinese mathematicians.

[7] Regarding his influence in China and help raising a generation of new mathematicians, ZALA films says:[7]Several world-renowned figures, such as Gang Tian and Shing-Tung Yau, consider Chern the mentor who helped them study in western countries following the bleak years of the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese universities were closed and academic pursuits suppressed.

By the time Chern started returning to China regularly during the 1980s, he had become a celebrity; every school child knew his name, and TV cameras documented his every move whenever he ventured forth from the institute he established at Nankai University.

[7]He has said that back then the main obstruent to the growth of math in China is the low pay, which is important considering that after the cultural revolution many families were impoverished.

Physics Nobel Prize winner (and former student) C. N. Yang has said that Chern is on par with Euclid, Gauss, Riemann, Cartan.

Griffiths wrote:[12]“More than any other mathematician, Shiing-Shen Chern defined the subject of global differential geometry, a central area in contemporary mathematics.

What makes differential forms such an ideal tool for studying local and global geometric properties (and for relating them to each other) is their two complementary aspects.

[34] His research on Finsler geometry is continued through Tian Gang, Paul C. Yang, and Sun-Yung Alice Chang of Princeton University.

Chern liked to play contract bridge, Go (game), read Wuxia-literature of Jin Yong and had an interest in Chinese philosophy and history.

[24] In 1975, Chen Ning Yang and Chern found out that their research in non-abelian gauge theory and Fiber bundle describe the same theoretical structure, which showed a surprising connection between physics and mathematics.

A polyglot, he spoke German, French, English, Wu and Mandarin Chinese.“Whenever we had to go to the chancellor to make some special request, we always took Chern along, and it always worked,” says Berkeley mathematician Rob Kirby.

He made Gauss-Bonnet a household word, Intrinsic proofs he found, Throughout the World his truths abound, Chern classes he gave us, and Secondary Invariants, Fibre Bundles and Sheaves, Distributions and Foliated Leaves!

[2] Allyn Jackson writes[5]S. S. Chern is the recipient of many international honors, including six honorary doctorates, the U.S. National Medal of Science, Israel’s Wolf Prize, and membership in learned academies around the world.

When Robert Uomini would buy his 10 tickets for the California State Lottery, he had an unusual “what if I win?” fantasy: He wanted to endow a professorship to honor S. S. Chern.

Twenty years later, while working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, Uomini won $22 million in the state lottery.

The March 1998 Symposium was co-sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and was expanded to run for three days, featuring a dozen speakers.

To paraphrase one passage: the outstanding mathematician Chern has two things to say, 1) I feel very mysterious that in the fields I'm working on (general relativity and differential geometry) there is so much more that can be explored; and 2) when talking with Albert Einstein (his colleague at the IAS) about his problem of a Grand Unified Theory, I realized the difference between mathematics and physics is at the heart of the journey towards a theory of everything.

In 1982, while on sabbatical at the New York University Courant Institute, he visited Stony Brook to see his friends and former students CN Yang and Simons.

And we hardly notice.Chern has 43 students, including Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau, Nobel Prize winner Chen-Ning Yang; and over 1000 descendants.

[46] His student James Harris Simons at Stony Brook (co-author of the Chern–Simons theory) later founded the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and became a billionaire.

Former director of the IAS Phillip Griffiths wrote[12][Chern] took great pleasure in getting to know and working with and helping to guide young mathematicians.