Lei Ni

Lei Ni (born 1969) is a mathematician. He holds emeritus professor status at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2018.

Ni was born in 1969,^[1] and from 1987 to 1993 attended Fudan University in China, from where he received a B.S. and M.S. degree in mathematics. He studied at the University of California, Irvine, from 1994 to 1998, and received a Ph.D. in mathematics,^[2] advised by Peter Wai-Kwong Li.^[3] Ni was an assistant professor at Purdue University from 1998 to 2000 and at Stanford University from 2000 to 2002, before moving to UC San Diego in 2002.^[2]

From 2002 to 2005, Ni worked as an assistant professor at UCSD, and from 2005 to 2009 as an associate professor.^[2] He received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2004.^[4] Ni served as chair of the mathematics department from 2016 to 2020,^[2] during which time, in 2018,^[5] he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for "contributions to geometric analysis, particularly to Ricci flow, and for mentorship".^[6] Since 2025, Ni has been an emeritus professor with Distinguished Professor title,^[2] in recognition of his career at the university.^[7]

His research areas include geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and partial differential equations.^[8] He has given talks on these topics to the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute.^[9] His publications on the Ricci flow include a 2006 book in the Graduate Studies in Mathematics series,^[10][11] and a four-part book in Mathematical Surveys and Monographs.^[12][13]

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