Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau (丘成桐) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the first ethnic Chinese recipient of the Fields Medal, awarded in 1982 for his solution of the Calabi conjecture. He retired from Harvard University in April 2022, where he held the William Caspar Graustein Professorship, and moved to Tsinghua University as a professor of mathematics the same year, becoming director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center he had founded there.

Born in Shantou, China, and raised in Hong Kong, Yau attended the Chinese University of Hong Kong before completing his PhD at UC Berkeley in 1971 under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential mathematicians of his generation, with foundational contributions to differential geometry, geometric analysis, and general relativity, including proving the positive energy theorem with Richard Schoen.

Yau has spent decades building mathematics infrastructure across Greater China, founding research centers and institutes at Tsinghua, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and National Taiwan University, and has been credited by colleagues with doing more than any other mathematician to fund and organize mathematical activity in mainland China and Hong Kong. Notably, Yau has described himself as having held no passport from any country when he received the Fields Medal in 1982, saying "I am proud to say... I should certainly be considered Chinese."