Andrew Yao

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Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Chinese: 姚期智; pinyin: Yáo Qīzhì) (born December 24, 1946) is a prominent computer scientist and computational theorist.

He received the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, in 2000, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity".

Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what we now call Yao's Principle.

Yao was born in Shanghai, China. He completed his undergraduate education in physics at the National Taiwan University, before completing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1972, and then a second PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He had been a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he continues to work on algorithms and complexity. In 2004, he became a Professor of the Center for Advanced Study, at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

He is a member of US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a foreign member of Chinese Academy of Sciences.