Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (born 24 December 1946 in Shanghai) is a computer scientist and the winner of the 2000 A.M. Turing Award. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He graduated in physics from National Taiwan University in 1967, earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard in 1972 and a second doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1975. He taught at MIT and Stanford, and from 1986 held the William and Edna Macaleer chair in computer science at Princeton. His research spans the theory of computation, cryptography, quantum computing and communication complexity, and he pioneered the theory of quantum communication complexity; his work on pseudorandom number generation, cryptography and communication complexity was the basis of his Turing Award. He received the George Polya Prize in 1987 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. In 2004 he left Princeton for Tsinghua University, where he founded the Tsinghua pilot class in computer science, widely known as the Yao Class, personally designing an English-taught curriculum, along with the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences and a quantum information centre. Since 2005 he has been the Bo Wen Distinguished Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and from 2011 dean of Tsinghua's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. He renounced his US citizenship in 2017 to become a Chinese citizen, and in 2021 was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology. From April 2024 he has been dean of Tsinghua's School of Artificial Intelligence.
Yao won the Turing Award for his theoretical work on pseudorandom number generation, cryptography and communication complexity, and pioneered the theory of quantum communication complexity. After returning to China he founded the Yao Class, whose international curriculum has trained a generation of computer scientists, and he later took charge of Tsinghua's School of Artificial Intelligence.
Achievements
- 2000 · Received the A.M. Turing Award for contributions to the theory of computation, pseudorandom number generation and communication complexity
- 2004 · Left Princeton University to become a professor at Tsinghua University
- 2005 · Founded the Yao Class at Tsinghua and became the Bo Wen Distinguished Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
- 2021 · Awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology