Shing-Tung Yau

From Free net encyclopedia

Shing-Tung Yau (丘成桐; Pinyin: Qīu Chéngtóng; born April 4, 1949) is a prominent mathematician working in differential geometry, and involved in the theory of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

He was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China with an ancestry in Jiaoling (also in Guangdong) in a family of eight children. His father, a philosophy professor, died when he was 14. Yau moved to Hong Kong with his family where, after graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969. He undertook graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his advisor was Shiing-Shen Chern. After receiving his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1971, he spent a post-doctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study. He then spent two years as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In 1974 he was appointed a professor at Stanford University. He returned to the Institute for Advanced Study as a professor in 1979. In that year, together with his former doctoral student Richard Schoen, he proved the positive energy theorem in general relativity. From 1984 to 1987 he was a professor at UC San Diego. In 1987 he moved to Harvard University, where he remains.

Yau has received a number of prominent awards. These include the Fields Medal in 1982 "for his contributions to partial differential equations, to the Calabi conjecture in algebraic geometry, to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity theory, and to real and complex Monge-Ampère equations", a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, the Crafoord Prize in 1994, and the (U.S.) National Medal of Science in 1997.

His name is romanized according to its pronunciation in Cantonese Chinese.

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