“The road was long and the sky far away.”
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Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau 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.
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science · Chinese-American mathematician (born 1949) · mathematician · professor · scientist · university teacher · also Shing-Tung Yau, S.-T. Yau, Yau
Born 4 April 1949 · Q334760
49 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 4 entries
“s contribution. Mr. YAU: Perelman”
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China Daily: Shing-Tung Yau predicts China's rise as global mathematical powerhouse
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scmp.com: SCMP Plus exclusive: meet Shing-Tung Yau in person
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2024· 1 entry
New Scientist: Shing-Tung Yau
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2023· 1 entry
Awarded Shaw Prize (2023).
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2019· 1 entry
Xiuxiong Chen, Donaldson, and Song Sun were awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize for resolution of the conjecture
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2018· 1 entry
Published “The Immune Landscape of Cancer” in Immunity — cited 4,796 times.
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2017· 1 entry
Schoen and Yau published a preprint claiming to resolve these difficulties, thereby proving the induction without dimensional restriction and verifying the Riemannian positive mass theorem in arbitrary dimension
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2014· 1 entry
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 Unive
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2013· 1 entry
Awarded Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013).
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2012· 1 entry
Published “Global Prevalence and Major Risk Factors of Diabetic Retinopathy” in Diabetes Care — cited 4,064 times.
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2010· 1 entry
Awarded Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2010).
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2009· 1 entry
Awarded Great Immigrants Award (2009).
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2006· 1 entry
Such as that Cao and Zhu gave "the first complete and detailed account of the proof of the Poincaré conjecture" should have been phrased more carefully
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2003· 1 entry
Awarded honorary doctor of the Zhejiang University (2003).
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2002· 1 entry
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
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1997· 1 entry
Won National Medal of Science (1997).
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1995· 1 entry
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
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1994· 1 entry
Awarded Crafoord Prize in Mathematics (1994).
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1993· 1 entry
With his frequent co-author Shiu-Yuen Cheng as associate director
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1991· 1 entry
Awarded Humboldt Prize (1991).
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1986· 1 entry
Yau and Peter Li made use of the same methods to study parabolic partial differential equations on Riemannian manifolds
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1985· 2 entries
By Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andrew Strominger, and Edward Witten that these Calabi–Yau manifolds, due to their special holonomy, are the appropriate configuration spaces for superstrings
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Simon Donaldson showed that, over a nonsingular projective variety of complex dimension two, a holomorphic vector bundle admits a hermitian Yang–Mills connection if and only if the bundle is stable
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1984· 2 entries
Awarded MacArthur Fellows Program (1984).
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Took a chair professorship at University of California, San Diego
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1982· 7 entries
Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship (1982).
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Won Fields medal (1982).
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In recognition of his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem, and the Monge–Ampère equation
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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
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“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.”
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Li and Yau resolved the Willmore conjecture in the non-embedded case
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Yau identified fourteen problems of interest in spectral geometry, including the above Pólya conjecture
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1981· 2 entries
Awarded Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1981).
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Awarded John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science (1981).
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1980· 1 entry
Li and Yau identified a number of new inequalities for Laplace–Beltrami eigenvalues, all based on the maximum principle and the differential Harnack estimates as pioneered five years earlier by Yau and Cheng−Yau
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1979· 1 entry
Moved back to the Institute for Advanced Study and he became a professor there in 1980
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1978· 2 entries
By studying the complex Monge–Ampère equation, Yau resolved the Calabi conjecture, which had been posed by Eugenio Calabi in 1954
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After the British Consulate revoked his Hong Kong residency due to his United States permanent residency status
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1976· 2 entries
Shiu-Yuen Cheng and Yau resolved the Minkowski problem in general dimensions via the method of continuity, making use of fully geometric estimates instead of the theory of the Monge–Ampère equation
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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
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1974· 1 entry
Became an associate professor at Stanford University
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1971· 2 entries
Under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern
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By Pogorelov, although his publicly available works (at the time of Cheng and Yau's work) had lacked some significant detail
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1967· 1 entry
Hideki Omori found a novel maximum principle which applies on noncompact Riemannian manifolds whose sectional curvatures are bounded below
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1960· 1 entry
George Pólya conjectured that the Weyl law actually gives control of each individual eigenvalue, and not only of their asymptotic distribution
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1949· 2 entries
Born 1949-04-04.
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Moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and then moved to the United States in 1969
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