Shing-Tung Yau
American mathematician from Hong Kong
Shing-Tung Yau (Chinese: 丘成桐; pinyin: Qiū Chéngtóng; Jyutping: jau1 sing4 tung4; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese American mathematician and educator. He is the first ethnic Chinese Fields medalist and director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
Yau was born in Shantou in 1949, moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and then moved 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 are also seen in the mathematical and physical fields of 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.
Biography
Yau was born in Shantou, Teoswa, China in 1949 to Han Chinese Hakka parents.[YN19] His dad's ancestral hometown is Jiaoling County, China.[YN19] His mother, Yeuk Lam Leung, was from Meixian District, China; his father, Chen Ying Chiu (丘鎭英), was a Chinese Kuomintang scholar of philosophy, history, literature, and economics.[YN19] He was the fifth of eight children.
During the Communist takeover of mainland China when he was only a few months old, his family moved to British Hong Kong where his schooling was (except for English classes) entirely in the Cantonese language instead of his parents' native Hakka Chinese.[YN19] He was not able to revisit until 1979, at the invitation of Hua Luogeng, when mainland China entered the reform and opening up.[YN19] They lived in Yuen Long at first, and then moved to Shatin in 1954.[YN19] They had financial troubles from having lost all of their possessions, and his father and second-oldest sister died when he was thirteen.[YN19] 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.[YN19] He left his textbooks with his younger brother, Stephen Shing-Toung Yau, who then decided to major in mathematics as well.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q334760. VIAF identifies the subject as 108647216. The Library of Congress control number is n81049468. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 2022, 1969 and 1982.
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