When Robert Uomini would buy his 10 tickets for the California State Lottery, he had an unusual “what if I win?” fantasy: He wanted to endow a professorship to honor S. S. Chern. While an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s, Uomini was greatly inspired by a differential geometry course he took from Chern. With Chern’s support and encouragement, Uomini entered graduate school at Berkeley and received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1976. Twenty years later, while working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, Uomini won $22 million in the state lottery. He could then realize his dream of expressing his gratitude in a concrete way.