Tan Lei

Tan Lei (18 March 1963 – 1 April 2016) was a mathematician specialising in complex dynamics and functions of complex numbers. She is most well-known for her contributions to the study of the Mandelbrot set and Julia set.

Career
After gaining her PhD in Mathematics in 1986 at University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, Tan worked as an assistant researcher in Geneva. She then conducted postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and University of Bremen until 1989, when she was made a lecturer at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France. Tan held a research position at University of Warwick from 1995 to 1999, before becoming a senior lecturer at Cergy-Pontoise University. She was made professor at University of Angers in 2009.

Mathematical work
Tan obtained important results about the Julia and Mandelbrot sets, in particular investigating their fractality and the similarities between the two. For example she showed that at the Misiurewicz points these sets are asymptotically similar through scaling and rotation. She constructed examples of polynomials whose Julia sets are homeomorphic to the Sierpiński carpet and which are disconnected. She contributed to other areas of complex dynamics. She also wrote some surveys and popularisation work around her research topics.

Legacy
A conference in Tan's memory was held in Beijing, China, in May 2016.