Professor Shing-Tung Yau, born in 1949 in Shantou, Guangdong Province, is a Chinese and naturalized American mathematician, and one of the most influential contemporary Mathematicians. In 1969, Yau graduated from the Department of Mathematics, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was then admitted to the University of California, Berkeley where he completed his PhD degree two years later in 1971 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of Prof. Shiing-Shen Chern. From the same year, he taught at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, State University of New York, and in Stanford University successively as a Distinguished Professor. Since 1987 to now, he has been a Distinguished Professor at Harvard University. He has also served as the Director of Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a Distinguished Visitig Professor-at-large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1994 and 2003 respectively. In addition, he has been a professor at the Department of Physics, Harvard University since 2013.

Yau has made extremely significant contributions to differential geometry. In 1976, he proved the Positive Mass Conjecture in the Calabi Conjecture and Einstein’s equation, and provided solutions through important integration of differential geometry and differential equations, which has far-reaching consequences till today. Thereafter, Yau continued to make a number of achievements in geometry, topology and physics. In 1982, at the age of 33, Yau was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in the international mathematics, regarded as the Nobel Prize in mathematics. He continued to be recognized via the Veblen Prize in Geometry (1981), the MacArthur Fellowship (1985), the Crafoord Prize (1994) and the US National Medal of Science (1997). In 2010, Professor Yau received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in recognition of his lifetime contribution to geometric analysis, and his enormous impact on many areas of geometry and physics.

Yau initiated the development of Mathematics in China. He led a number of research institutes in China, including Shing-Tung Yau Center of Southest University (SEUYC). As the Director of SEUYC, he is fully responsible for academic planning, talent introduction, overseas recruitment and other important work of SEUYC. 

Academic achievements:

Calabi Conjecture, Complex Monge-Ampere Equations, Minkowski Problem, Positive Energy Theorem, Hermitian-Einstein Metric, Smith Conjecture, Mirror Symmetry Conjecture (SYZ Conjecture), Liu-Sun-Yau Metric, etc.