Shing-Tung Yau

Foreign Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences Member of National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. Winner of Fields Medal

Professor Shing-Tung Yau, born in 1949 in Shantou, Guangdong Province, is a Chinese and naturalized American mathematician. He is a member of the NAS, AAAS and the foreign academician of CAS. In 1969, Yau graduated from the Department of Mathematics, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was then admitted to the University of California, Berkeley where he completed his PhD degree two years later in 1971 under the supervision of Prof. Shiing-Shen Chern.

Yau has made extremely significant contributions to differential geometry. In 1976, he proved the Calabi Conjecture. In 1979, Yau and Richard Schoen solved the Positive Mass Conjecture in General Relativity. He provided solutions through important integration of differential geometry and differential equations, which have farreaching consequences till today. Thereafter, Yau continued to make a number of achievements in geometry, topology and theoretical physics.

Professor Shing-Tung Yau currently serves as a chair professor at Tsinghua University. He is the Director of Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Dean of Qiuzhen College at Tsinghua University and the Director of Beijing Yanqi Lake Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications. He also spends an enormous amount of energy to train young mathematicians at every level. In 1982, Yau was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor of the international mathematics. He continued to be recognized via the Veblen Prize in Geometry (1981), the MacArthur Fellowship (1985), the Crafoord Prize (1994), the US National Medal of Science (1997), the Wolf Prize (2010) and the Marcel Grossmann Award (2018).