Person: Yau, Shing-Tung
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese mathematician who won a Fields Medal for his work on differential geometry and partial differential equations.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Life was tough for Yau living in a village outside Hong Kong city in a house which had no electricity or running water and at this stage of his life he often played truant from school preferring his role as leader of a street gang.
- By good fortune, one of his lecturers at the College had studied at the University of California, and, seeing Yau's enormous potential, suggested that he go there to study for a doctorate.
- Yau studied for his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley under Chern's supervision.
- He received his Ph.D. in 1971 and, during session 1971-72, Yau was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
- Yau was appointed assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1972.
- Yau was awarded a Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to partial differential equations, to the Calabi conjecture in algebraic geometry, to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity theory, and to real and complex Monge-Ampère equations.
- Nirenberg described Yau's work at the International Congress in Warsaw in 1983.
- Nirenberg describes briefly the areas of Yau's work.
- Yau's solution is classical in spirit, via a priori estimates.
- Yau solved the Calabi conjecture in 1976.
- Another conjecture solved by Yau was the positive mass conjecture, which comes from Riemannian geometry.
- Yau, in joint work, constructed minimal surfaces, studied their stability and made a deep analysis of how they behave in space-time.
- Yau, working with W H Meeks solved this problem in 1980.
- In joint work of Yau with Karen Uhlenbeck On the existence of Hermitian Yang-Mills connections in stable bundles (1986), they solved higher dimensional versions of the Hitchin-Kobayashi conjecture.
- Yau was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.
- Yau's team is one of these and he has been criticised by some for comments which people felt did not give Perelman full credit.
- However Yau has clearly stated that it had only been his intention to say that his team made Perelman's proof understandable to a much wider range of mathematicians.
Born 4 April 1949, Kwuntung (now Guangdong), China.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Origin China, Prize Wolf
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
