Fan Rong K Chung Graham (金芳蓉, pinyin: Jīn Fāngróng) (born October 9, 1949 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan), known professionally as Fan Chung, is a mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős-Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution (including power-law graphs in the study of large information networks).
Since 1998 she has been the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, under the direction of Herbert Wilf. After working at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore for nineteen years, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the first female tenured professor in mathematics. She serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international journals. Since 2003 she has been the editor-in-chief of Internet Mathematics. She has given invited lectures in many conferences, including the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994, and a plenary lecture on the mathematics of PageRank at the 2008 Annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. She was selected to be a Noether Lecturer in 2009.
Chung has two children, the first born during her graduate studies, from her first marriage. Since 1983 she has been married to the mathematician Ronald Graham. They were close friends of the mathematician Paul Erdős, and have both published papers with him – 13 in her case; thus, both have Erdős numbers of 1.
She has published more than 200 research papers and three books:
- Erdős on Graphs: His Legacy of Unsolved Problems (with Ron Graham), A K Peters, Ltd., 1998, ISBN 1-56881-079-2
- Spectral Graph Theory (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 92), American Mathematical Society, 1997, ISBN 0-8218-0315-8
- Complex Graphs and Networks (CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, No. 107 " (with Linyuan Lu), American Mathematical Society, 2006, ISBN 0-8218-3657-9
In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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