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.Local properties of The Mandelbrot set M, Similarity between M and Julia sets, Proceedings of the seventh European Women in Mathematics (EWM) meeting, Madrid, 1995, S. 71-82. For example she showed that at the Misiurewicz points these sets are asymptotically similar through scaling and rotation.Similarity between the Mandelbrot set and Julia Sets, Communications in Mathematical Physics 134 (1990), pp. 587-617. She constructed examples of polynomials whose Julia sets are homeomorphic to the Sierpiński carpetA Sierpinski carpet as Julia set, Appendix to: J. Milnor, Geometry and dynamics of quadratic rational maps, Exp. Math., volume 2, 1993, pp. 78-81 and which are disconnected.With K. Pilgrim: Rational maps with disconnected Julia set, Astérisque, volume 261, 2000, pp. 349-384 She contributed to other areas of complex dynamics.With G.-Zh. Cui: A characterization of hyperbolic rational maps, Invent. math., Band 183, 2011, S. 451-516.With Xavier Buff: The quadratic dynatomic curves are smooth and irreducible, in: Araceli Bonifant, Misha Lyubich, Scott Sutherland (eds.), Frontiers in Complex Dynamics: In Celebration of John Milnor's 80th Birthday, Princeton University Press, 2014, S. 49-72. She also wrote some surveys and popularisation work around her research topics.With Xavier Buff and G.-Zh. Cui: Teichmüller spaces and holomorphic dynamics, in: Athanase Papadopoulos (ed.), Handbook of Teichmüller Theory, Volume 4, EMS 2014With Arnaud Chéritat: Si nous faisons danser les racines? Un hommage à Bill Thurston , Images des mathématiques CNRS, 7 Nov. 2012
Legacy A conference in Tan's memory was held in Beijing, China, in May 2016.
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