Miranda Cheng

Miranda Chih-Ning Cheng (; born 6 June 1979, Taipei) is a Taiwanese mathematician and theoretical physicist who works as an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for formulating the umbral moonshine conjectures and for her work on the connections between K3 surfaces and string theory.

Early life Cheng was born in 1979 in Taipei, Taiwan, where she first became interested in literature and music, and was particularly interested in pop music, rock, and punk. School was relatively easy for Cheng as she went on to skip two years and got moved to a special class. Unfortunately, the competitiveness and stress that came from school caused her to drop out and leave her parents' home to work at a record store and play in a punk rock band at the age of 16. Despite not completing high school, Cheng was still able to attend university through a program for gifted science students. Cheng moved to the Netherlands to continue her studies where she earned a master's degree in theoretical physics in 2003 from Utrecht University, under the supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft. After postdoctoral study at Harvard University and working as a researcher at CNRS, she returned to Amsterdam in 2014, with a joint position in the Institute of Physics and Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics. In reference to the string theory underlying umbral moonshine, Cheng said that “it suggests that there’s a special symmetry acting on the physical theory of K3 surfaces.”