This volume is the proceedings of a special conference dedicated to the legacy of Prof. S.-S. Chern, virtually held at the Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University. The conference lasted 2 weeks, and included more than 80 talks, highlighted by a special public lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, on his Nobel winning work on black-holes.

The talks ranged from string theory to number theory, from algebraic geometry to muon detectors, from machine-learning to category theory, etc., all intended to be colloquium-style talks lasting 45 min each. Prof. Chern was a huge proponent and influential figure in “Mathematical Dialogues” and the wide range of topics and discussions are in this spirit.

This book is appealing to mathematicians at the PhD level who are eager to learn about how interesting mathematics show up in different fields, especially geometry, theoretical physics, number theory and modern data science.