Tan Lei (Chinese: 谭蕾; 18 March 1963 – 1 April 2016) was a mathematician specialising in complex dynamics and functions of complex numbers.

[1] After gaining her PhD in Mathematics in 1986 at University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, Tan worked as an assistant researcher in Geneva.

She then conducted postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and University of Bremen until 1989, when she was made a lecturer at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France.

[2] Tan obtained important results about the Julia and Mandelbrot sets, in particular investigating their fractality and the similarities between the two.

[pub 1] For example she showed that at the Misiurewicz points these sets are asymptotically similar through scaling and rotation.