Tan Lei (; 18 March 1963 – 1 April 2016) was a mathematician specialising in complex dynamics and Complex analysis. She is most well-known for her contributions to the study of the Mandelbrot set and Julia set.
Career
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. Tan held a research position at University of Warwick from 1995 to 1999, before becoming a senior lecturer at Cergy-Pontoise University. She was made professor at University of Angers in 2009.
Mathematical work
Tan obtained important results about the
Julia set and
, in particular investigating their fractality and the similarities between the two.
[ Local properties of The Mandelbrot set M, Similarity between M and Julia sets, Proceedings of the seventh European Women in Mathematics (EWM) meeting, Madrid, 1995, S. 71-82.] For example she showed that at the Misiurewicz points these sets are asymptotically similar through scaling and rotation.
[ Similarity between the Mandelbrot set and Julia Sets, Communications in Mathematical Physics 134 (1990), pp. 587-617.] She constructed examples of polynomials whose Julia sets are homeomorphic to the Sierpiński carpet
[ A Sierpinski carpet as Julia set, Appendix to: J. Milnor, Geometry and dynamics of quadratic rational maps, Exp. Math., volume 2, 1993, pp. 78-81] and which are disconnected.
[With K. Pilgrim: Rational maps with disconnected Julia set, Astérisque, volume 261, 2000, pp. 349-384] She contributed to other areas of complex dynamics.
[With G.-Zh. Cui: A characterization of hyperbolic rational maps, Invent. math., Band 183, 2011, S. 451-516.][With Xavier Buff: The quadratic dynatomic curves are smooth and irreducible, in: Araceli Bonifant, Misha Lyubich, Scott Sutherland (eds.), Frontiers in Complex Dynamics: In Celebration of John Milnor's 80th Birthday, Princeton University Press, 2014, S. 49-72.] She also wrote some surveys and popularisation work around her research topics.
[With Xavier Buff and G.-Zh. Cui: Teichmüller spaces and holomorphic dynamics, in: Athanase Papadopoulos (ed.), Handbook of Teichmüller Theory, Volume 4, EMS 2014][With Arnaud Chéritat: Si nous faisons danser les racines? Un hommage à Bill Thurston , Images des mathématiques CNRS, 7 Nov. 2012]
Legacy
A conference in Tan's memory was held in
Beijing,
China, in May 2016.
Publications
Thesis
Books
Articles
