Shing-Tung Yau was born in Shantou, Guangdong, on 4 April 1949, with ancestral roots in Jiaoling, and moved with his family to Hong Kong the same year, growing up in a farming village in the New Territories. His father, Yau Chen-ying, a philosophy professor at Chung Chi College, had eight children and died when Yau was fourteen, leaving the family in straitened circumstances; schooled at Pui Ching Middle School, Yau was steeped from childhood in literature, history and poetry by his father. He entered the mathematics department of Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1966, finished his undergraduate degree in three years, and in 1969 went to the University of California, Berkeley, taking his doctorate in 1971 under the geometer S. S. Chern. In 1976 he proved the Calabi conjecture, which had defeated mathematicians for more than two decades; the Calabi-Yau manifolds derived from it became central to geometric analysis and string theory, serving as the basis for compactification of extra dimensions in string theory. With Richard Schoen he used minimal-surface theory to prove the positive mass conjecture and made major advances in general relativity and geometry, including the Schoen-Yau black hole existence theorem. He received the American Mathematical Society's Veblen Prize in 1981 and in 1982 the Fields Medal, the first Chinese mathematician so honoured, at the age of thirty-three. He taught for many years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stanford, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, San Diego and Harvard, founded both the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at CUHK and the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University, and in 2022 left Harvard to work full-time at Tsinghua, where he also heads the Beijing Yanqi Lake Institute of Applied Mathematics. He has also held a MacArthur Fellowship (1985), the Crafoord Prize (1994) and the US National Medal of Science (1997), as well as the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2010) and the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences (2023). He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an academician of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, and holds honorary doctorates from many universities. He has long promoted mathematical research and training across the Chinese-speaking world, establishing multiple research centres in mainland China and Hong Kong, and in 2008 founded the Yau High School Mathematics Award to encourage young students; many of his doctoral students have become leaders in mathematics. His father, Yau Chen-ying, was an educator and philosopher who taught at Xiamen University and later at Chung Chi College and wrote a history of Western philosophy, while his mother, Liang Ruo-lin, raised the eight children after her husband's death. After his doctorate Yau taught at the Institute for Advanced Study and at Stony Brook, becoming a professor in 1976.
Shing-Tung Yau's proof of the Calabi conjecture opened up the field of geometric analysis, and the Calabi-Yau manifolds it produced became a foundation of string theory. With Richard Schoen he proved the positive mass conjecture and solved several major problems in general relativity and geometry. Awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, he was the first Chinese mathematician to receive that honour, and went on to win the Wolf Prize and the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. He has long promoted mathematical research across the Chinese-speaking world, founding several research centres and training a large number of mathematicians, many of whom have become leaders in the field.
Achievements
- 1976 · Proved the Calabi conjecture, which had baffled mathematicians for over two decades.
- 1982 · Received the Fields Medal, the first Chinese mathematician to be so honoured.
- 2010 · Received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.