Chung was a native of
Hangzhou, the capital city of
Zhejiang Province. Chung entered
Tsinghua University in 1936, and initially studied
physics at its Department of Physics. In 1940, Chung graduated from the Department of Mathematics of the
National Southwestern Associated University, where he later worked as a
teaching assistant. During this period, he first studied number theory with
Lo-Keng Hua and then probability theory with
Pao-Lu Hsu. In 1944, Chung was chosen to be one of the recipients of the 6th
Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program for study in the United States. He arrived at
Princeton University in December 1945 and obtained his
PhD in 1947. Chung's dissertation was titled “On the maximum partial sum of sequences of independent random variables” and was under the supervision of
John Wilder Tukey and
Harald Cramér. In 1950s, Chung taught at the
University of Chicago,
Columbia University,
UC-Berkeley,
Cornell University and
Syracuse University. He then transferred to
Stanford University in 1961, where he made fundamental contributions to the study of
Brownian motion and laid the framework for the general mathematical theory of
Markov chains. Chung was later appointed Professor Emeritus of Mathematics of the Department of Mathematics at Stanford. Chung was regarded as one of the leading probabilists after
World War II. He was an Invited Speaker at the
ICM in 1958 in Edinburgh and in 1970 in Nice. Some of his most influential contributions have been in the form of his expositions in his textbooks on elementary probability and Markov chains. In addition, Chung also explored other branches of mathematics, such as probabilistic
potential theory and gauge theorems for the
Schrödinger equation. Chung's visit to China in 1979 (together with
Joseph L. Doob and Jacques Neveu), and his subsequent visits, served as points of renewed exchange between Chinese probabilists and their Western counterparts. He also served as an external examiner for several universities in the Asian region, including the
National University of Singapore. In 1981, with
Erhan Cinlar and
Ronald Getoor, Chung initiated the "Seminars on Stochastic Processes", a popular annual national meeting covering Markov processes, Brownian motion and probability. Chung possessed a wide-ranging and intimate knowledge of literature and music, especially opera. He also had an interest in
Italian culture and taught himself Italian after he retired. He spoke several languages and translated a probability book from
Russian to English. Chung died of natural causes on June 1, 2009, at the age of 91. ==Selected publications==