Ruan, Zhong-Jin | University of Illinois Archives

Zhong-Jin Ruan (1955 - ) was assistant professor (1988-93), associate professor (1993-98); and professor (1998-2019) of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Professor Ruan has been an emeritus professor of mathematics at UIUC since 2019. He is best known for his work in operator spaces, operator algebras, Banach Algebra and locally compact quantum groups. In 1986, he discovered a matricial norm characterization for operator spaces.

Ruan was born in China on December 22, 1955, and earned a B.A. from Nankai University (Tianjin, China) in 1982. He continued his studies in the United States, where he earned a M.A. in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University (1984) and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (1987), working with Edward G. Effros as his thesis advisor. Ruan was visiting assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley (1987-88) prior to his appointment at UIUC. Over the course of his career, he held a fellowship at the UIUC Center for Advanced Study (1990-91) and visiting professorships at The Fields Institute at Waterloo, Canada (1995), IHP, Paris (2000), MSRI Berkeley (2001) and Universite de Franche-Comte, Besancon, Franche-Comte, France (2005). He served as editor for the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (2002-2007), Illinois Journal of Mathematics (2002-2007), Frontiers of Mathematics (2008), and Operators and Matrices (2012). He lectured widely on his research interests and organized a number of conferences, including the Wabash Seminars and Miniconference (2001-present); International Conference on Banach Spaces and Operator Spaces at Nankai University, Tianjin, China (2007), and the Workshop on Operator Spaces and Quantum Groups at the Fields Institute, Toronto Canada (2007).

Ruan was the recipient of the UIUC Mahlon M. Day Award for Distinguished Mathematical Research (2003-2005). He retired in May 2019.

Sources:

"Zhong-Jin Ruan," accessed April 23, 2021, https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~ruan/.

"Zhong-Jin Ruan," Math Times, UIUC Department of Mathematics (Spring 2019): p. 21