Shing-Tung Yau (; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese American mathematician and educator. He is the first ethnic Chinese Fields medalist and 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."Questions and answers with Shing-Tung Yau", Physics Today, 11 April 2016.
Yau was born in Shantou in 1949, moved to 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.Albers, Donald J.; Alexanderson, G. L.; Reid, Constance. International Mathematical Congresses. An Illustrated History 1893-1986. Rev. ed. including ICM 1986. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1986 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.
Biography Yau was born in Shantou, Teoswa, China in 1949 to Han Chinese Hakka parents. His dad's ancestral hometown is Jiaoling County, China. His mother, Yeuk Lam Leung, was from Meixian District, China; his father, Chen Ying Chiu (), was a Chinese Kuomintang scholar of philosophy, history, literature, and economics. He was the fifth of eight children.
During the Communist takeover of mainland China when he was only a few months old, his family moved to British Hong Kong where his schooling was (except for English classes) entirely in the Cantonese language instead of his parents' native Hakka Chinese. He was not able to revisit until 1979, at the invitation of Hua Luogeng, when mainland China entered the reform and opening up. They lived in Yuen Long at first, and then moved to Shatin in 1954. They had financial troubles from having lost all of their possessions, and his father and second-oldest sister died when he was thirteen. Yau began to read and appreciate his father's books, and became more devoted to schoolwork. After graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969, without receiving a degree due to graduating early. He left his textbooks with his younger brother, Stephen Shing-Toung Yau, who then decided to major in mathematics as well.
Yau left for the Ph.D. program in mathematics at University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1969. Over the winter break, he read the first issues of the Journal of Differential Geometry, and was deeply inspired by John Milnor's papers on geometric group theory.Shinobu Hosono. Interview with Shing-Tug Yau. Subsequently, he formulated a generalization of Preissman's theorem, and developed his ideas further with Blaine Lawson over the next semester.Page at Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University Using this work, he received his Ph.D. the following year, in 1971, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern.Shing-Tung Yau. Mathematics Genealogy.
He spent a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before joining Stony Brook University in 1972 as an assistant professor. In 1974, he became an associate professor at Stanford University. In 1976, he took a visiting faculty position at UCLA and married physicist Yu-Yun Kuo, whom he knew from his time as a graduate student at Berkeley. In 1979, he moved back to the Institute for Advanced Study and he became a professor there in 1980. In 1984, he took a chair professorship at University of California, San Diego. In 1987, he moved to Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau retired from Harvard, where he was William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics Emeritus. In the same year, he moved to Tsinghua University as a professor of mathematics.
According to Yau's autobiography, he became "stateless" in 1978 after the British Consulate revoked his Hong Kong residency due to his United States permanent residency status."Stephen Hawking invited me to discuss [the proof] with him at Cambridge University in late August 1978. I gladly accepted.... Travel was difficult, however, because the British Consulate had recently taken my Hong Kong resident card, maintaining that I could not keep it now that I had a U.S. green card. In the process, I had become stateless. I was no longer a citizen of any country.... until I became a U.S. citizen in 1990."According to the Chinese nationality law, he was a Chinese national by descent and birth and remained so until his naturalization. Regarding his status when receiving his Fields Medal in 1982, Yau stated "I am proud to say that when I was awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly be considered Chinese." Yau remained "stateless" until 1990, when he obtained United States citizenship.
With science journalist Steve Nadis, Yau has written a non-technical account of Calabi-Yau manifolds and string theory, a history of Harvard's mathematics department, a case for the construction of the Circular Electron Positron Collider in China, an autobiography, and a book on the relation of geometry to physics.
Academic activities Yau has made major contributions to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis. As said by William Thurston in 1981:"Shing-Tung Yau, mathematician at UCSD awarded the Fields Medal." In "News Releases," Series Two of the University Communications Public Relations Materials. RSS 6020. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego
His most widely celebrated results include the resolution (with Shiu-Yuen Cheng) of the boundary-value problem for the Monge-Ampère equation, the positive mass theorem in the mathematical analysis of general relativity (achieved with Richard Schoen), the resolution of the Calabi conjecture, the topological theory of minimal surfaces (with William Meeks), the Donaldson-Uhlenbeck-Yau theorem (done with Karen Uhlenbeck), and the Cheng−Yau and Li−Yau gradient estimates for partial differential equations (found with Shiu-Yuen Cheng and Peter Li). Many of Yau's results (in addition to those of others) were written into textbooks co-authored with Schoen.
In addition to his research, Yau is the founder and director of several mathematical institutes, mostly in China. John Coates has commented that "no other mathematician of our times has come close" to Yau's success at fundraising for mathematical activities in mainland China and Hong Kong. During a sabbatical year at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, Yau was asked by Charles Kao to start a mathematical institute at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After a few years of fundraising efforts, Yau established the multi-disciplinary Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1993, with his frequent co-author Shiu-Yuen Cheng as associate director. In 1995, Yau assisted Yongxiang Lu with raising money from Ronnie Chan and Gerald Chan's Morningside Group for the new Morningside Center of Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yau has also been involved with the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University,Centre Director. Center of Mathematical Sciences, Zhejiang University. at Tsinghua University,About. Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University. at National Taiwan University,Directory. Institute of Applied Mathematical Sciences at National Taiwan University. and in Sanya.Tsinghua Sanya International Mathematics Forum. More recently, in 2014, Yau raised money to establish the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (of which he is the director), the Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and the Center for Immunological Research, all at Harvard University.
Modeled on an earlier physics conference organized by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, Yau proposed the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, which is now held every three years. The first congress was held at the Morningside Center from December 12 to 18, 1998. He co-organizes the annual "Journal of Differential Geometry" and "Current Developments in Mathematics" conferences. Yau is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Differential Geometry,Editorial Board of Journal of Differential Geometry. Asian Journal of Mathematics,Editorial Board of Asian Journal of Mathematics. and Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics.Editorial Board of Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. As of 2021, he has advised over seventy Ph.D. students.
In Hong Kong, with the support of Ronnie Chan, Yau set up the Hang Lung Award for high school students. He has also organized and participated in meetings for high school and college students, such as the panel discussions Why Math? Ask Masters! in Hangzhou, July 2004, and The Wonder of Mathematics in Hong Kong, December 2004. Yau also co-initiated a series of books on popular mathematics, "Mathematics and Mathematical People".
In 2002 and 2003, Grigori Perelman posted preprints to the arXiv claiming to prove the Thurston geometrization conjecture and, as a special case, the renowned Poincaré conjecture. Although his work contained many new ideas and results, his proofs lacked detail on a number of technical arguments. Over the next few years, several mathematicians devoted their time to fill in details and provide expositions of Perelman's work to the mathematical community."Russian Reports He Has Solved a Celebrated Math Problem." New York Times (April 15, 2003). Sara Robinson. A well-known August 2006 article in the New Yorker written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber about the situation brought some professional disputes involving Yau to public attention. Alexander Givental alleged that Bong Lian, Kefeng Liu, and Yau illegitimately took credit from him for resolving a well-known conjecture in the field of mirror symmetry. Although it is undisputed that Lian−Liu−Yau's article appeared after Givental's, they claim that his work contained gaps that were only filled in following work in their own publication; Givental claims that his original work was complete. Nasar and Gruber quote an anonymous mathematician as agreeing with Givental.For both sides of the dispute, see:
and Footnote 17 in In the 1980s, Yau's colleague Yum-Tong Siu accused Yau's Ph.D. student Gang Tian of plagiarizing some of his work. At the time, Yau defended Tian against Siu's accusations. In the 2000s, Yau began to amplify Siu's allegations, saying that he found Tian's dual position at Princeton University and Peking University to be highly unethical due to his high salary from Peking University compared to other professors and students who made more active contributions to the university.Famous scientist slams academic corruption in China , China View (Xinhua), 17 August 2006. Retrieved on 2008-08-05. Science Magazine covered the broader phenomena of such positions in China, with Tian and Yau as central figures.