December 7, 2004 Shiing-Shen Chern, 93, Innovator in New Geometry, Is Dead By KENNETH CHANG r. Shiing-Shen Chern, a mathematician whose seemingly purely abstract discoveries about the twistings of geometric surfaces have found wide use in physics and mathematics, died Friday at his home in Tianjin, China. He was 93.Dr. Chern also helped set up three mathematics institutes, two in China and one at the University of California, Berkeley. Nankai University, where Dr. Chern established an institute in 1985, reported his death."He's a towering figure in 20th-century mathematics," said Dr. Calvin C. Moore, a professor of mathematics at the...