Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau (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 he was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.

Yau was born in Shantou, Guangdong, Republic of China in 1949 to Hakka parents.

His ancestral hometown is Jiaoling County, China.

His mother, Yeuk Lam Leung, was from Meixian District, China; his father, Chen Ying Chiu 丘鎭英, was a Republic of China 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 he was forced to learn to speak the Cantonese language as well as his parent's native Hakka Chinese language.

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 was born in Swatow, Canton, Republic of China, moved to British Hong Kong at a young age, and then moved to the United States in 1969.

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.

Subsequently he formulated a generalization of Preissman's theorem, and developed his ideas further with Blaine Lawson over the next semester.

Using this work, he received his Ph.D. the following year, in 1971, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern.

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 with UCLA and married physicist Yu-Yun Kuo, who he knew from his time as a graduate student at Berkeley.

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.

He was not able to revisit until 1979, at the invitation of Hua Luogeng, when mainland China entered the reform and opening era..

As said by William Thurston in 1981:

"We have rarely had the opportunity to witness the spectacle of the work of one mathematician affecting, in a short span of years, the direction of whole areas of research. In the field of geometry, one of the most remarkable instances of such an occurrence during the last decade is given by the contributions of Shing-Tung Yau."

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.

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.

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.

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."

From 1984 to 1987 he worked at University of California, San Diego.

Since 1987, he has been at Harvard University.

In April 2022, Yau announced a forthcoming move from Harvard to Tsinghua University.

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, and an autobiography.

Yau has made major contributions to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis.