Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese American mathematician and educator, born in Shantou in 1949, who moved to Hong Kong as an infant and to the United States in 1969. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 under Shiing-Shen Chern, and he became the first ethnic Chinese Fields medalist when he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem and the Monge-Ampere equation. He is considered one of the major contributors to modern differential geometry and geometric analysis, with an impact also on algebraic geometry, mirror symmetry, general relativity and string theory. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1987 until 2022, when he moved to Tsinghua University, and he has founded several mathematical institutes, mostly in China.