He was also a stamp collector, known for his book Shanghai Large Dragons, The First Issue of The Shanghai Local Post, published in 1996.
Research
According to the Chinese-American mathematician and Wolf Prize laureate Shiing-Shen Chern,
"Wei-Liang was an original and versatile mathematician, although his major field was algebraic geometry. He made several fundamental contributions to mathematics:
A fundamental issue in algebraic geometry is intersection theory. The Chow ring has many advantages and is widely used.
The Chow associated forms give a description of the moduli space of the algebraic varieties in projective space. It gives a beautiful solution of an important problem.
His theorem that a compact analytic variety in a projective space is algebraic is justly famous. The theorem shows the close analogy between algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.
Generalizing a result of Caratheodory on thermodynamics, he formulated a theorem on accessibility of differential spaces. The theorem plays a fundamental role in control theory.
A lesser-known paper of his on homogeneous spaces gives a beautiful treatment of the geometry known as the projective geometry of matrices and treated by elaborate calculations. His discussions are valid in a more general context."[2]
^Chow, Wei-Liang; Chern, Shiing-Shen; Shokurov, Vyachesav V., eds. (2002). Collected Papers of Wei-Liang Chow. The World Scientific Series in 20th Century Mathematics. World Scientific. p. 492. ISBN9789812380944.