astronomy

Tan Eng Chye

Tan Eng Chye is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Tan Eng Chye rather than just read about it. In short: Tan Eng Chye (simplified Chinese: 陈永财; traditional Chinese: 陳永財; pinyin: Chén Yǒngcái) is a Singaporean mathematician and university administrator who has been serving as the fifth president of the National University of Singapore since 2018. Prior to his presidency, he served as the deputy president of academic affairs and provost at the National University of Singapore.

Key takeaways

Tan Eng Chye belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Tan Eng Chye to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Tan Eng Chye from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Tan Eng Chye (simplified Chinese: 陈永财; traditional Chinese: 陳永財; pinyin: Chén Yǒngcái) is a Singaporean mathematician and university administrator who has been serving as the fifth president of the National University of Singapore since 2018. Prior to his presidency, he served as the deputy president of academic affairs and provost at the National University of Singapore.

Education Tan attended Raffles Institution between 1974 and 1979 before graduating from the National University of Singapore in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) degree in mathematics. He later went on to obtain his PhD from Yale University in 1989, under the guidance of Roger Howe.

Career

He joined NUS as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics in 1985, as a Senior Tutor. In June 2003, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science, a post he held till March 2007. Up till 2017, he served as NUS' Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost. Tan Eng Chye's research interests are representation theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, invariant theory and algebraic combinatorics. In collaboration with Roger Howe, he has written a graduate-level textbook on non-Abelian harmonic analysis which was described in a review as "Every chapter is full of beautiful mathematics that is not as well known as it deserves to be." He has also been active in promoting mathematics, having established the Singapore Mathematical Society Enrichment Programmes in 1994, revamped the Singapore Mathematical Olympiad in 1995 to allow more participation from students, and initiated a series of project teaching workshops for teachers in 1998. He served as president of the Singapore Mathematical Society from 2001 to 2005 and President of the South East Asian Mathematical Society from 2004 to 2005.

2018–present: NUS presidency On 28 July 2017, Tan was named as the next president of NUS, taking over Tan Chorh Chuan. He assumed office at the start of 2018. Along with the appointed, he was appointed to A*STAR's board as well, taking the seat meant for the university's president. In 2020, NUS raised US$300 million through its first green bond. In the same year, it established a research institute called the Asian Institute of Digital Finance along with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and National Research Foundation. In 2020, Tan said in an interview that he had plans for NUS to "tear down structures that inhibit interdisciplinarity", with Professor Joanne Roberts of Yale-NUS College commenting that there were similarities between Yale-NUS and Tan's plans. On 22 September 2020, NUS unveiled its plans for an interdisciplinary college, the College of Humanities and Sciences, allowing students to take courses from both the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The new college took in its first intake in 2021. As part of a broader plan to introduce interdisciplinary colleges, in 2021, Tan announced that Yale-NUS College would be closed by 2025, with 2021 intake of freshmen being the last intake. The college would also be merged with NUS' University Scholars Programme to offer a new curriculum. The decision was unilaterally made by NUS, and came as a surprise to Yale-NUS' students and faculty, NUS' faculty, and Yale. More than 10,000 people had signed a petition calling for the reversal of the decision. Questions about the decision filed in the Singapore Parliament by various members of parliament were answered on 13 September 2021.

Honours and awards Tan received the Pingat Pentadbiran Awam, Emas (Public Administration Medal, Gold) in Singapore's National Day Awards 2014. He has been a Fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science since 2011. He was conferred the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association in 2018, and received an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Southampton, UK in the same year. Tan was conferred the title of Knight of the French Order of the Legion of Honour on 5 July 2022, in recognition of his distinguished contributions in education and research.

Selected works Howe, Roger; Tan, Eng-Chye (1992). Non-Abelian harmonic analysis. Applications of SL(2,R). Universitext. Springer-Verlag, New York. doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-9200-2. ISBN 0-387-97768-6. Howe, Roger E.; Tan, Eng-Chye (1993). "Homogeneous Functions on Light Cones: \\the Infinitesimal Structure of some Degenerate Principal Series Representations". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 28: 1–75. arXiv:math/9301214. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1993-00360-4. Aslaksen, Helmer; Tan, Eng-Chye; Zhu, Chen-Bo (1995). "Invariant theory of special orthogonal groups". Pacific Journal of Mathematics. 168 (2): 207–215. doi:10.2140/pjm.1995.168.207. Li, Jian-Shu; Paul, Annegret; Tan, Eng-Chye; Zhu, Chen-Bo (2003). "The explicit duality correspondence of (Sp(p,q),O∗(2n))". Journal of Functional Analysis. 200 (1): 71–100. doi:10.1016/S0022-1236(02)00079-4. Howe, Roger; Tan, Eng-Chye; Willenbring, Jeb F. (2005). "Stable branching rules for classical symmetric pairs". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 357 (4): 1601–1627. doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-04-03722-5. Howe, Roger; Jackson, Steven; Teck Lee, Soo; Tan, Eng-Chye; Willenbring, Jeb (2009). "Toric degeneration of branching algebras". Advances in Mathematics. 220 (6): 1809–1841. doi:10.1016/j.aim.2008.11.010.

References

External links Tan Eng Chye Personal Web Page The Mathematics Genealogy Project – Eng-Chye Tan National University of Singapore President Biography

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Tan Eng Chye

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Tan Eng Chye claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Tan Eng Chye before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Tan Eng Chye ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Tan Eng Chye

In research: Tan Eng Chye appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Tan Eng Chye in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Tan Eng Chye is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic staff of the National University of Singapore, Living people, National University of Singapore alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Tan Eng Chye outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Tan Eng Chye in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Tan Eng Chye means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Tan Eng Chye out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tan Eng Chye in simple terms?

Why does Tan Eng Chye matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Tan Eng Chye?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Tan Eng Chye.