Shing-Tung Yau | |
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Born | |
Nationality | China (1949-1990), American (since 1990) |
Alma mater | Chinese University of Hong Kong University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
Known for |
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Spouse | Yu-yun Kuo |
Children | Michael Yau, Isaac Yau |
Awards | John J. Carty Award (1981) Veblen Prize (1981) Fields Medal (1982) Crafoord Prize (1994) National Medal of Science (1997) Wolf Prize (2010) Shaw Prize (2023) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Tsinghua University Harvard University Stanford University Stony Brook University Institute for Advanced Study |
Thesis | On the Fundamental Group of Compact Manifolds of Non-Positive Curvature (1971) |
Doctoral advisor | Shiing-Shen Chern |
Doctoral students | Richard Schoen (Stanford, 1977) Robert Bartnik (Princeton, 1983) Mark Stern (Princeton, 1984) Huai-Dong Cao (Princeton, 1986) Gang Tian (Harvard, 1988) Jun Li (Stanford, 1989) Wanxiong Shi (Harvard, 1990) Lizhen Ji (Northeastern, 1991) Kefeng Liu (Harvard, 1993) Mu-Tao Wang (Harvard, 1998) Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu (Harvard, 2002) Valentino Tosatti (Harvard, 2009) |
Shing-Tung Yau (/jaʊ/; Chinese: 丘成桐; pinyin: Qiū Chéngtóng; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.[1][2]
Yau was born in Shantou in 1949, moved to British Hong Kong at a young age, and then moved to the United States in 1969. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, in recognition of his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem, and the Monge–Ampère equation.[3] Yau is considered one of the major contributors to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis. The impact of Yau's work are also seen in the mathematical and physical fields of convex geometry, algebraic geometry, enumerative geometry, mirror symmetry, general relativity, and string theory, while his work has also touched upon applied mathematics, engineering, and numerical analysis.