Professor Chen-Jung Hsu (1918-1988) was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1918. Taiwan was then a Japanese colony. In 1941 Professor Hsu graduated from Tohoku Imperial University and worked in Japan until the end of the second world war. He came back to Taiwan in 1946 and joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics in the National Taiwan University (known as the Japanese Taihoku Imperial University previously).

The department started almost from scratch consisting only of a few mathematicians. During those difficult years of heavy teaching duty and harsh living conditions, Professor Hsu was one of few mathematicians in Taiwan who still kept doing research. Around 1960 he published a series of papers in Tohoku Mathematical  Journal establishing the fundamental theory of what are later called Sasakian manifolds. Even before in the forties, he already published papers on his lattice theory in top journals including the Annals of Mathematics.

He was the first serious research mathematician from Taiwan. From 1965 to 1983 he was a professor at the Kansas State University. In 1981 he accepted the offer of the Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica as a research fellow and retired there in 1988. He was one of the founders, not only of the mathematics department, but in fact also of the entire mathematics community of Taiwan. Professor Hsu cared about the next generations of mathematicians in Taiwan, and had played substantial role in shaping the careers of many Taiwanese mathematicians after him. Professor Hsu remained a modest and generous man throughout his life. These two great attributes remain part of his family legacy even after his death.

In memory of the great contributions of Professor Hsu to the mathematical development of Taiwan, the Mathematical Society of Taiwan and the Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica decided to establish Chen-Jung Hsu Lectures starting from 2011. The Society and the Institute plan to invite an outstanding world class mathematician to deliver a lecture series every year. These annual events are sponsored by the Institute of Mathematics and funds of the Society coming from donations of the Hsu family.