Shing-Tung Yau
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yau.
| Shing-Tung Yau | |
 Shing-Tung Yau at Harvard Law School dining hall
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| Born | April 4, 1949 Shantou, Guangdong Province, China |
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| Residence | U.S. |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Harvard University, Chinese University of Hong Kong Zhejiang University |
| Alma mater | Chinese University of Hong Kong (B.A. 1969) UC Berkeley (Ph. D 1971) |
| Doctoral advisor | Shiing-Shen Chern |
| Doctoral students | Huai-Dong Cao, Princeton 1986 Richard Schoen, Stanford 1977 |
| Notable awards | Fields Medal (1982) Veblen prize (1981) |
Shing-Tung Yau (Chinese: 丘成桐; pinyin: Qiū Chéngtóng; born April 4, 1949) is a mathematician working in differential geometry, and involved in the theory of Calabi-Yau manifolds.
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[edit] Biography
Yau was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China with an ancestry in Jiaoling (also in Guangdong) in a family of eight children.When Yau was fourteen his father, a philosophy professor, died. Yau moved to Hong Kong with his family where, after graduating from Pui Ching Middle School, he studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969. He undertook graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his advisor was Shiing-Shen Chern. After receiving his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1971, he spent a post-doctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study. He then spent two years as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
In 1974 he was appointed a professor at Stanford University. In 1976 he proved Calabi's conjecture[1] on a class of manifolds now named Calabi-Yau manifolds, which has now become the geometric ground where physicists build their string theory. He returned to the Institute for Advanced Study as a professor in 1979. In that year, together with his former doctoral student Richard Schoen, he proved the positive energy theorem in general relativity. From 1984 to 1987 he was a professor at UC San Diego. In 1987 he moved to Harvard University, where he remains.
His revolutionary use of the methods of partial differential equations in the area of differential geometry has had a lasting impact on geometry.[citation needed]
[edit] Educational and research activities
Yau is renowned as an energetic teacher and educator. He has advised more than 50 PhD students, with many of them receiving professorships. His book with Richard M. Schoen, Lectures on Differential Geometry, is a popular text for students of differential geometry and geometric analysis. In other works, he has collected hundreds of unsolved problems in geometry and topology. In the 1990s, Kefeng Liu,Bong Lian and Yau wrote a series of papers on the mirror conjecture and its generalizations. During 2005, Kefeng Liu，Xiaofeng Sun and Yau systematically studied the geometric aspects of the moduli space of Riemann Surfaces, and they proved that many known metric on the moduli space are equivalent, which is called Liu-Sun-Yau metric today. This theorem was conjectured by Yau much earlier.
Yau has devoted much of his time to the development of mathematics in China. He is the founder of Morningside Center of Mathematics in Beijing and Center of Mathematical Science in Zhejiang University. From August 2002, Yau and his colleagues organized conferences, workshops and summer schools in Zhejiang University. In the summer of 2004, Yau was chief organizer of the International Conference in Memory of Armand Borel, held in Hangzhou.
Yau was chief organizer of Strings 2006, an international physics conference on string theory, held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Among the lecturers was physicist Stephen Hawking, a long time friend of Yau[2].
Yau has recently been highly active in alleging widespread academic corruption in China, particularly concerning the mathematics field.[3]
[edit] Honours and awards
Yau has received a number of awards. These include the Fields Medal in 1982 "for his contributions to partial differential equations, to the Calabi conjecture in algebraic geometry, to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity theory, and to real and complex Monge-Ampère equations", a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, the Crafoord Prize in 1994, and the (U.S.) National Medal of Science in 1997.
[edit] Trivia
His name is romanized according to its pronunciation in Cantonese Chinese. He loves traditional Chinese literature, and he has written many Chinese poems.
[edit] Poincaré conjecture debates
In August 2006, a New Yorker article on the Poincaré conjecture, "Manifold Destiny", discussed Yau's relationship to that famous problem.[4] The article claims that Yau attempted to transfer credit for the proof from Grigori Perelman to Yau's students, as evidenced by the manner in which the paper by his students was rushed through without review and how the paper never acknowledged that it was Perelman who provided the proof first. Instead the paper claimed to be "the first written account of a complete proof of the Poincaré conjecture and the geometrization conjecture of Thurston."[5] - a statement which was retracted in December 2006. The article also mentions other alleged improprieties on Yau's part, including a possible effort to transfer credit for an important proof related to mirror symmetry from Alexander Givental to Yau's student Kefeng Liu.
Yau claims this article is defamatory, and in September 2006 he established a public relations website, managed by the PR firm Spector and Associates, to dispute points in it and demand an apology. As of April 05, 2007, fifteen mathematics professors, including two quoted in the New Yorker article, have posted letters of support on Yau's website.[6] The New Yorker reportedly stands by its article.[7]
On October 17, 2006, a more sympathetic profile of Yau appeared, along with photographs from different stages of his life, in the New York Times.[8] After recounting Yau's humble beginnings and rise to academic stardom, it devotes about half its length to the Perelman affair. The article acknowledges that Yau's egotism and high-profile activities, including criticism of Chinese academia, have alienated some of his colleagues and that Yau's promotion of the Cao-Zhu paper "annoyed many mathematicians, who felt that Dr. Yau had slighted Dr. Perelman." It paints Yau as ultimately more concerned with the development of mathematics than with his reputation. In regards to the Perelman affair, the article focuses on Yau's position, which is that Perelman's proof was not understood by all, and he "had a duty to dig out the truth of the proof."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 74 (May 1977) pp.1798-1799 <http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/74/5/1798>.
- ^ Celebrity scientist gets star treatment in China for cosmos theory <http://english.people.com.cn/200606/20/eng20060620_275392.html>.
- ^ World famous mathematician slams academic corruption in China <http://english.people.com.cn/200508/18/eng20050818_203206.html>.
- ^ Manifold Destiny: A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060828fa_fact2>.
- ^ Introduction section in the paper by Cao Huaidong and Zhu Xiping . "A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures - application of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of the Ricci flow", vol. 10, no. 2, p.165-492, Asian Journal of Mathematics, June 2006.
- ^ Yau's website, with information on his legal action and letter to The New Yorker
- ^ "On his Web site, doctoryau.com, Dr. Yau has posted a 12-page letter showing what he and his lawyer say are errors in the article. The New Yorker has said it stands by its reporting." "Scientist at Work: Shing-Tung Yau, The Emperor of Math", By Dennis Overbye. October 17, 2006, The New York Times
- ^ Dennis Overbye. "Shing-tung Yau: The Emperor of Math", New York Times, 17 October 2006.
[edit] External links
- Interview (11 pages long in Traditional Chinese)
- Yau's autobiographical account (mostly English, some Chinese)
- O'Connor, John J. & Robertson, Edmund F., “Shing-Tung Yau”, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- Shing-Tung Yau at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Banquet photos
- Yau's website, with information on his legal action and letter to The New Yorker
- Yau's Public Relations agent, Spector and Associates
- Richard S Hamilton' Letter to Yau Shing-Tung' Attorney on September 25, 2006
- Plugging A Math Gap
- UC Irvine courting Yau with a $2.5 million professorship
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yau, Shing-Tung |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1949-4-4 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Shantou, Guangdong Province, China |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
