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Shing-Tung Yau
Summary
Shing-Tung Yau (jaʊ; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University.
Yau was born in Shantou, China, moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and to the United States in 1969. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, in recognition of his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem, and the Monge–Ampère equation. Yau is considered one of the major contributors to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis.
The impact of Yau's work can be seen in the mathematical and physical fields of differential geometry, partial differential equations, convex geometry, algebraic geometry, enumerative geometry, mirror symmetry, general relativity, and string theory, while his work has also touched upon applied mathematics, engineering, and numerical analysis.
Yau was born in Shantou, China in 1949 to Hakka parents. Yau's ancestral hometown is Jiaoling county, China. His mother, Yeuk Lam Leung, was from Meixian District; his father, Chen Ying Chiu, was a Chinese scholar of philosophy, history, literature, and economics. He was the fifth of eight children, with Hakka ancestry.
During the Communist takeover of mainland China, when he was only a few months old, his family moved to Hong Kong where he was forced to learn to speak the Cantonese language as well as speak the Chinese dialect of Hakka. He was not able to revisit until 1979, at the invitation of Hua Luogeng, when mainland China entered the reform and opening era.. They had financial troubles from having lost all of their possessions, and his father and second-oldest sister died when he was thirteen. Yau began to read and appreciate his father's books, and became more devoted to schoolwork. After graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969, without receiving a degree due to graduating early.
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