繁體中文
丘成桐（Shing-Tung Yau），1949年4月4日在廣東汕頭出生，祖籍廣東蕉嶺，同年隨家人移居香港，在新界農村長大。父親丘鎮英為教育家、哲學家，曾在廈門大學任教，後任崇基學院哲學教授，與國學大師錢穆交往甚密，並著有《西洋哲學史》；母親梁若琳出身書香門第。一家有八兄弟姊妹，父親在他十四歲時去世，家境轉趨困難，母親獨力撫養子女成人。他畢業於香港培正中學，自幼受父親薰陶，喜愛文史詩詞。1966年他入讀香港中文大學崇基學院數學系，三年修畢本科；1969年他獲獎學金赴美國加州大學柏克萊分校深造，師承數學大師陳省身，1971年獲博士學位，其後先後任教於普林斯頓高等研究院及紐約州立大學石溪分校，1976年升任教授。1976年，他證明困擾數學界二十多年的卡拉比猜想，由此衍生之「卡拉比–丘流形」成為幾何分析與弦理論的核心概念，弦理論中額外維度的緊致化便以這類流形為基礎。他與舍恩合作，藉極小曲面理論證明正質量猜想，並解決廣義相對論與幾何學多個難題，其中包含舍恩–丘黑洞存在定理。1981年他獲美國數學會維布倫獎，1982年他獲菲爾茲獎，是首位獲此數學界最高榮譽的華人，得獎時年僅三十三歲。他其後長期任教於紐約州立大學石溪分校、史丹福大學、普林斯頓高等研究院、加州大學聖地牙哥分校及哈佛大學，並先後創辦香港中文大學數學科學研究所及清華大學丘成桐數學科學中心，2022年更離任哈佛，全職轉往清華大學任教，並任北京雁棲湖應用數學研究院院長。他另獲麥克阿瑟獎（1985）、克拉福德獎（1994）及美國國家科學獎章（1997）等多個國際學術榮譽，2010年獲沃爾夫數學獎，2023年獲邵逸夫數學科學獎。他先後當選美國國家科學院院士、中國科學院外籍院士及台灣中央研究院院士，並獲多所大學頒授榮譽博士。他多年來推動華人地區的數學研究及人才培育，在中國大陸與香港設立多個數學研究中心，並於2008年創辦丘成桐中學數學獎，鼓勵中學生鑽研數學，其門下學生多人成為數學界領軍人物。他亦着力培養年輕一代，強調做學問要兼具文史修養與人文關懷，其學術視野與人格風範深受後輩敬重。他少年時生活清貧，十四歲喪父後靠母親持家與獎學金完成學業；功成名就後，他多次應邀在國際數學家大會等場合發表演講。他亦主張數學與物理、工程的交叉研究，其幾何分析工作至今仍是弦理論的重要數學基礎。他常勉勵年輕學者耐得住寂寞、獨立思考，並強調基礎研究對長遠發展的重要。
English
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.
