45 Facts About Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.

Shing-Tung Yau was born in Shantou, China, moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and to the United States in 1969.

Shing-Tung Yau is considered one of the major contributors to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis.

Shing-Tung Yau was born in Shantou, China in 1949 to Hakka parents.

Shing-Tung Yau's mother, Yeuk Lam Leung, was from Meixian District; his father, Chen Ying Chiu, was a Chinese scholar of philosophy, history, literature, and economics.

Shing-Tung Yau was the fifth of eight children, with Hakka ancestry.

Shing-Tung Yau was not able to revisit until 1979, at the invitation of Hua Luogeng, when mainland China entered the reform and opening era.

Shing-Tung Yau began to read and appreciate his father's books, and became more devoted to schoolwork.

Shing-Tung Yau left his textbooks with his younger brother, Stephen Shing-Toung Yau, who then decided to major in mathematics as well.

Shing-Tung Yau spent a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before joining Stony Brook University in 1972 as an assistant professor.

In 1978, Shing-Tung Yau became "stateless" after the British Consulate revoked his Hong Kong residency due to his United States permanent residency status.

Shing-Tung Yau has made major contributions to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis.

Many of Shing-Tung Yau's results were written into textbooks co-authored with Schoen.

In 1995, Shing-Tung Yau assisted Yongxiang Lu with raising money from Ronnie Chan and Gerald Chan's Morningside Group for the new Morningside Center of Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Shing-Tung Yau has been involved with the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University, at Tsinghua University, at National Taiwan University, and in Sanya.

Shing-Tung Yau is an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Differential Geometry, Asian Journal of Mathematics, and Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics.

In Hong Kong, with the support of Ronnie Chan, Shing-Tung Yau set up the Hang Lung Award for high school students.

Shing-Tung Yau co-initiated a series of books on popular mathematics, "Mathematics and Mathematical People".

Shing-Tung Yau claimed that Nasar and Gruber's article was defamatory and contained several falsehoods, and that they did not give him the opportunity to represent his own side of the disputes.

Shing-Tung Yau considered filing a lawsuit against the magazine, claiming professional damage, but says he decided that it wasn't sufficiently clear what such an action would achieve.

Shing-Tung Yau established a public relations website, with letters responding to the New Yorker article from several mathematicians, including himself and two others quoted in the article.

Shing-Tung Yau has made a number of major research contributions, centered on differential geometry and its appearance in other fields of mathematics and science.

Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau exploited this observation by finding novel constructions of stable minimal hypersurfaces with various controlled properties.

Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau then adapted their work to the setting of certain Riemannian asymptotically flat initial data sets in general relativity.

Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau extended this to the full Lorentzian formulation of the positive mass theorem by studying a partial differential equation proposed by Pong-Soo Jang.

Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau established an induction on dimension by constructing Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature on minimal hypersurfaces of Riemannian manifolds which have positive scalar curvature.

In 2017, Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau published a preprint claiming to resolve these difficulties, thereby proving the induction without dimensional restriction and verifying the Riemannian positive mass theorem in arbitrary dimension.

Gerhard Huisken and Shing-Tung Yau made a further study of the asymptotic region of Riemannian manifolds with strictly positive mass.

Huisken and Shing-Tung Yau adapted his work to the Riemannian setting, proving a long-time existence and convergence theorem for the flow.

In particular, Cheng and Shing-Tung Yau were able to find complete Kahler-Einstein metrics of negative scalar curvature on any bounded, smooth, and strictly pseudoconvex subset of complex Euclidean space.

Cheng and Shing-Tung Yau were able to use their differential Harnack estimates to show that, under certain geometric conditions, closed submanifolds of complete Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian spaces are themselves complete.

In 1982, Li and Shing-Tung Yau resolved the Willmore conjecture in the non-embedded case.

William Meeks and Shing-Tung Yau produced some foundational results on minimal surfaces in three-dimensional manifolds, revisiting points left open by older work of Jesse Douglas and Charles Morrey.

Outside of the setting of submanifold rigidity problems, Shing-Tung Yau was able to adapt Jurgen Moser's method of proving Caccioppoli inequalities, thereby proving new rigidity results for functions on complete Riemannian manifolds.

Cheng and Shing-Tung Yau's papers followed some ideas presented in 1971 by Pogorelov, although his publicly available works had lacked some significant detail.

Cheng and Shing-Tung Yau proved that they are asymptotic to convex cones, and conversely that every convex cone corresponds in such a way to some hyperbolic affine sphere.

Bong Lian, Kefeng Liu, and Shing-Tung Yau gave a rigorous proof that this formula holds.

Jeff Cheeger and Shing-Tung Yau studied the heat kernel on a Riemannian manifold.

Paul Yang and Shing-Tung Yau showed that in the case of a closed two-dimensional manifold, the first eigenvalue is bounded above by an explicit formula depending only on the genus and volume of the manifold.

Li and Shing-Tung Yau proved a weakened version of Polya's conjecture, obtaining control of the averages of the eigenvalues by the expression in the Weyl law.

In 1982, Shing-Tung Yau identified fourteen problems of interest in spectral geometry, including the above Polya conjecture.

Xianfeng Gu and Shing-Tung Yau considered the numerical computation of conformal maps between two-dimensional manifolds, and in particular the computation of uniformizing maps as predicted by the uniformization theorem.

Shing-Tung Yau has received honorary professorships from many Chinese universities, including Hunan Normal University, Peking University, Nankai University, and Tsinghua University.

Shing-Tung Yau has honorary degrees from many international universities, including Harvard University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and University of Waterloo.

Shing-Tung Yau is a foreign member of the National Academies of Sciences of China, India, and Russia.