The Ky Fan and Yu-Fen Fan Endowment has been established to support Members in the School of Mathematics, with a preference for those from Peking University. The endowment was established with the remainder from a trust established in 1999 by Ky Fan, an Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and former Member (1945–47) in the School of Mathematics, who spent some of his formative years at the Institute. Fan, who made fundamental contributions to operator and matrix theory, convex analysis and inequalities, linear and nonlinear programming, topology, and topological groups, died in March 2010 at the age of ninety-five.
A native of Hangzhou, China, Fan received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 1936, and his D.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Paris in 1941, under the supervision of Maurice Fréchet. In addition to Fréchet, Fan was influenced by John von Neumann and Hermann Weyl, both early Faculty members at the Institute. Fan’s work in fixed point theory, in addition to influencing nonlinear functional analysis, has found wide application in mathematical economics and game theory, potential theory, calculus of variations, and differential equations.