Yuan Yuan

Yuan Yuan is a mathematician specializing in several complex variables and complex geometry who left his professorship at Syracuse University in New York to join Westlake University's Institute for Theoretical Sciences in Hangzhou in May 2025, just months after being promoted to full professor at Syracuse.

Yuan earned his BA from Peking University in 2004 and his PhD from Rutgers University in 2010, followed by a J.J. Sylvester Assistant Professorship at Johns Hopkins University and a Research Membership at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. He joined Syracuse in 2013, rising from Assistant to Associate to full Professor over more than a decade there. His research focuses on the rigidity of holomorphic maps, Bergman and Szegő projections, and geometric flows on Kähler manifolds.

Yuan is one of four mathematicians recruited by Westlake in the summer of 2025 after long US careers, alongside Zhongwei Shen (University of Kentucky), Yiyuan She (Florida State University), and Hai Zhu (Flatiron Institute). "Maths can really be done anywhere — all you need is paper, a pen and a computer with internet," he said of his decision to return. "If you have colleagues who share your passion, that makes it even better."