Shing-Tung Yau - Biography

Biography

Yau was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China with an ancestry in Jiaoling (also in Guangdong) in a family of eight children. When he was only a few months old, his family emigrated to Hong Kong, where they lived first in Yuen Long and then 5 years later in Shatin. When Yau was fourteen, his father Chiou Chenying, a philosophy professor, died.

After graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969. Yau went to the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1969. At the age of 22, Yau was awarded the Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern at Berkeley in two years. He spent a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and two years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Then he went to Stanford University.

Since 1987, he has been at Harvard University, where he has had numerous Ph.D. students. He is also involved in the activities of research institutes in Hong Kong and China. He takes an interest in the state of K-12 mathematics education in China, and his criticisms of the Chinese education system, corruption in the academic world in China, and the quality of mathematical research and education, have been widely publicized.