Shing-Tung Yau
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yau.
Shing-Tung Yau |
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Born |
April 4, 1949 (1949-04-04) (age 60)
Shantou, Guangdong Province, China |
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
Gang Tian, Harvard 1988
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Notable awards |
Fields Medal (1982)
Veblen prize (1981)
Crafoord Prize (1994)
National Medal of Science (1997)
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Shing-Tung Yau (Chinese: 丘成桐; pinyin: Qiū Chéngtóng; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese American mathematician working in differential geometry, and involved in the theory of Calabi-Yau manifolds.
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. Yau has served as the chair of the Harvard mathematics department since 2008.
His revolutionary use of the methods of partial differential equations in the area of differential geometry has had a lasting impact on geometry.
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 metrics on the moduli space are equivalent to one metric, which is now called the Liu-Sun-Yau metric. 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]
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.
Trivia
His name is romanized according to its pronunciation in Standard Cantonese. He loves traditional Chinese literature, and he has written many Chinese poems.
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] 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.[5] The New Yorker reportedly stands by its article.[6]
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.[7] 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,[8] 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."
See also
- Calabi-Yau manifold
- Positive energy theorem
- Schoen-Yau conjecture
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>.
- ↑ 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 (17 October 2006). "Shing-tung Yau: The Emperor of Math", New York Times.
- ↑ Famous scientist slams academic corruption in China, China View (Xinhua), 17 August 2006. Retrieved on 2008-08-05.
External links
Fields Medalists |
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Lars Ahlfors / Jesse Douglas (1936) · Laurent Schwartz / Atle Selberg (1950) · Kunihiko Kodaira / Jean-Pierre Serre (1954) · Klaus Roth / René Thom (1958) · Lars Hörmander / John Milnor (1962) · Michael Atiyah / Paul Cohen / Alexander Grothendieck / Stephen Smale (1966) · Alan Baker / Heisuke Hironaka / Sergei Petrovich Novikov / John G. Thompson (1970) · Enrico Bombieri / David Mumford (1974) · Pierre Deligne / Charles Fefferman / Grigory Margulis / Daniel Quillen (1978) · Alain Connes / William Thurston / Shing-Tung Yau (1982) · Simon Donaldson / Gerd Faltings / Michael Freedman (1986) · Vladimir Drinfel'd / Vaughan Jones / Shigefumi Mori / Edward Witten (1990) · Efim Zelmanov / Pierre-Louis Lions / Jean Bourgain / Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (1994) · Richard Borcherds / William Timothy Gowers / Maxim Kontsevich / Curtis T. McMullen (1998) · Laurent Lafforgue / Vladimir Voevodsky (2002) · Andrei Okounkov / Grigori Perelman / Terence Tao / Wendelin Werner (2006)
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National Medal of Science laureates |
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Behavioral and social science |
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1960s
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1964: Roger Adams · Othmar H. Ammann · Theodosius Dobzhansky · Neal Elgar Miller
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1980s
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1990s
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1990: Leonid Hurwicz · Patrick Suppes 1991: Robert W. Kates · George A. Miller 1992: Eleanor J. Gibson 1994: Robert K. Merton 1995: Roger N. Shepard 1996: Paul A. Samuelson 1997: William K. Estes 1998: William Julius Wilson 1999: Robert M. Solow
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2000s
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2000: Gary Becker 2001: George Bass 2003: R. Duncan Luce 2004: Kenneth Arrow 2005: Gordon H. Bower
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Biological sciences |
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1960s
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1963: Cornelius Van Niel 1964: Marshall W. Nirenberg 1965: Francis P. Rous · George G. Simpson · Donald D. Van Slyke 1966: Edward F. Knipling · Fritz Albert Lipmann · William C. Rose · Sewall Wright 1967: Kenneth S. Cole · Harry F. Harlow · Michael Heidelberger · Alfred H. Sturtevant 1968: Horace Barker · Bernard B. Brodie · Detlev W. Bronk · Jay Lush · Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1969: Robert J. Huebner · Ernst Mayr
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1970s
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1970: Barbara McClintock · Albert B. Sabin 1973: Daniel I. Arnon · Earl W. Sutherland, Jr. 1974: Britton Chance · Erwin Chargaff · James V. Neel · James Augustine Hannon 1975: Hallowell Davis · Paul Gyorgy · Sterling Brown Hendricks · Orville lvin Vogel 1976: Roger C.L. Guillemin · Keith Roberts Porter · Efraim Racker · E. O. Wilson 1979: Robert H. Burris · Elizabeth C. Crosby · Arthur Kornberg · Severo Ochoa · Earl Reece Stadtman · George Ledyard Stebbins · Paul Alfred Weiss
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1980s
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1981: Philip Handler 1982: Seymour Benzer · Glenn W. Burton · Mildred Cohn 1983: Howard L. Bachrach · Paul Berg · Wendell L. Roelofs · Berta Scharrer 1986: Stanley Cohen · Donald A. Henderson · Vernon B. Mountcastle · George Emil Palade · Joan A. Steitz 1987: Michael E. Debakey · Theodor O. Diener · Harry Eagle · Har Gobind Khorana · Rita Levi-Montalcini 1988: Michael S. Brown · Stanley N. Cohen · Joseph L. Goldstein · Maurice R. Hilleman · Eric R. Kandel · Rosalyn S. Yalow 1989: Katherine Esau · Viktor Hamburger · Philip Leder · Joshua Lederberg · Roger W. Sperry · Harland G. Wood
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1990s
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1990: Baruj Benacerraf · Herbert W. Boyer · Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. · Edward B. Lewis · David G. Nathan · E. Donnall Thomas 1991: Mary Ellen Avery · G. Evelyn Hutchinson · Elvin A. Kabat · Salvador E. Luria · Paul A. Marks · Folke K Skoog · Paul C. Zamecnik 1992: Maxine Singer · Howard M. Temin 1993: Daniel Nathans · Salome G. Waelsch 1994: Thomas Eisner · Elizabeth F. Neufeld 1995: Alexander Rich 1996: Ruth Patrick 1997: James D. Watson · Robert A. Weinberg 1998: Bruce Ames · Janet Rowley 1999: David Baltimore · Jared Diamond · Lynn Margulis
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2000s
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2000: Nancy C. Andreasen · Peter H. Raven · Carl Woese 2001: Francisco J. Ayala · Mario R. Capecchi · Ann M. Graybiel · Gene E. Likens · Victor A. McKusick · Harold Varmus 2002: James E. Darnell · Evelyn M. Witkin 2003: J. Michael Bishop · Solomon H. Snyder · Charles Yanofsky 2004: Norman E. Borlaug · Phillip A. Sharp · Thomas E. Starzl 2005: Anthony Fauci · Torsten N. Wiesel 2006: Rita R. Colwell · Nina Fedoroff · Lubert Stryer
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Chemistry |
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1980s
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1982: F. Albert Cotton · Gilbert Stork 1983: Roald Hoffmann · George C. Pimentel · Richard N. Zare 1986: Harry B. Gray · Yuan Tseh Lee · Carl S. Marvel · Frank H. Westheimer 1987: William S. Johnson · Walter H. Stockmayer · Max Tishler 1988: William O. Baker · Konrad E. Bloch · Elias J. Corey 1989: Richard B. Bernstein · Melvin Calvin · Rudoph A. Marcus · Harden M. McConnell
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1990s
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1990: Elkan Blout · Karl Folkers · John D. Roberts 1991: Ronald Breslow · Gertrude B. Elion · Dudley R. Herschbach · Glenn T. Seaborg 1992: Howard E. Simmons, Jr. 1993: Donald J. Cram · Norman Hackerman 1994: George S. Hammond 1995: Thomas Cech · Isabella L. Karle 1996: Norman Davidson 1997: Darleane C. Hoffman · Harold S. Johnston 1998: John W. Cahn · George M. Whitesides 1999: Stuart A. Rice · John Ross · Susan Solomon
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2000s
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2000: John D. Baldeschwieler · Ralph F. Hirschmann 2001: Ernest R. Davidson · Gabor A. Somorjai 2002: John I. Brauman 2004: Stephen J. Lippard 2006: Marvin H. Caruthers · Peter B. Dervan · Robert S. Langer
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Engineering sciences |
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1960s
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1970s
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1970: George E. Mueller 1973: Harold E. Edgerton · Richard T. Whitcomb 1974: Rudolf Kompfner · Ralph Brazelton Peck · Abel Wolman 1975: Manson Benedict · William Hayward Pickering · Frederick E. Terman · Wernher von Braun 1976: Morris Cohen · Peter C. Goldmark · Erwin Wilhelm Müller 1979: Emmett N. Leith · Raymond D. Mindlin · Robert N. Noyce · Earl R. Parker · Simon Ramo
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1980s
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1982: Edward H. Heinemann · Donald L. Katz 1983: William R. Hewlett · George M. Low · John G. Trump 1986: Hans Wolfgang Liepmann · T. Y. Lin · Bernard M. Oliver 1987: Robert B. Bird · H. Bolton Seed · Ernst Weber 1988: Daniel C. Drucker · Willis M. Hawkins · George W. Housner 1989: Harry George Drickamer · Herbert E. Grier
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1990s
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1990: Mildred S. Dresselhaus · Nick Holonyak Jr. 1991: George Heilmeier · Luna B. Leopold · H. Guyford Stever 1992: Calvin F. Quate · John Roy Whinnery 1993: Alfred Y. Cho 1994: Ray W. Clough 1995: Hermann A. Haus 1996: James L. Flanagan · C. Kumar N. Patel 1998: Eli Ruckenstein 1999: Kenneth N. Stevens
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2000s
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2000: Yuan-Cheng B. Fung 2001: Andreas Acrivos 2002: Leo Beranek 2003: John M. Prausnitz 2004: Edwin N. Lightfoot 2005: Jan D. Achenbach · Tobin J. Marks
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Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences |
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1960s
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1963: Norbert Wiener 1964: Solomon Lefschetz · H. Marston Morse 1965: Oscar Zariski 1966: John Milnor 1967: Paul Cohen 1968: Jerzy Neyman 1969: William Feller
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1970s
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1980s
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1982: Marshall Harvey Stone 1983: Herman Goldstine · Isadore Singer 1986: Peter Lax · Antoni Zygmund 1987: Raoul Bott · Michael Freedman 1988: Ralph E. Gomory · Joseph B. Keller 1989: Samuel Karlin · Saunders MacLane · Donald C. Spencer
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1990s
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1990: George F. Carrier · Stephen Cole Kleene · John McCarthy 1991: Alberto Calderón 1992: Allen Newell 1993: Martin Kruskal 1994: John Cocke 1995: Louis Nirenberg 1996: Richard M. Karp · Stephen Smale 1997: Shing-Tung Yau 1998: Cathleen Synge Morawetz 1999: Felix Browder · Ronald R. Coifman
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2000s
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2000: John Griggs Thompson · Karen K. Uhlenbeck 2001: Calyampudi R. Rao · Elias M. Stein 2002: James G. Glimm 2003: Carl R. de Boor 2004: Dennis P. Sullivan 2005: Bradley Efron 2006: Hyman Bass
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Physical sciences |
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1960s
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1970s
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1970: Robert H. Dicke · Allan R. Sandage · John C. Slater · John A. Wheeler · Saul Winstein 1973: Carl Djerassi · Maurice Ewing · Arie Jan Haagen-Smit · Vladimir Haensel · Frederick Seitz · Robert Rathbun Wilson 1974: Nicolaas Bloembergen · Paul Flory · William Alfred Fowler · Linus Carl Pauling · Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer 1975: Hans A. Bethe · Joseph Hirschfelder · Lewis Sarett · E. Bright Wilson · Chien-Shiung Wu 1976: Samuel Goudsmit · Herbert S. Gutowsky · Frederick Rossini · Verner Suomi · Henry Taube · George Uhlenbeck 1979: Richard P. Feynman · Herman Mark · Edward M. Purcell · John Sinfelt · Lyman Spitzer · Victor F. Weisskopf
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1980s
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1982: Philip W. Anderson · Yoichiro Nambu · Edward Teller · Charles H. Townes 1983: E. Margaret Burbidge · Maurice Goldhaber · Helmut Landsberg · Walter Munk · Frederick Reines · Bruno B. Rossi · J. Robert Schrieffer 1986: Solomon Buchsbaum · Horace Crane · Herman Feshbach · Robert Hofstadter · Chen Ning Yang 1987: Philip Abelson · Walter Elsasser · Paul C. Lauterbur · George Pake · James A. Van Allen 1988: D. Allan Bromley · Paul Ching-Wu Chu · Walter Kohn · Norman F. Ramsey · Jack Steinberger 1989: Arnold O. Beckman · Eugene Parker · Robert Sharp · Henry Stommel
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1990s
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1990: Allan M. Cormack · Edwin M. McMillan · Robert Pound · Roger Revelle 1991: Arthur L. Schawlow · Ed Stone · Steven Weinberg 1992: Eugene M. Shoemaker 1993: Val Fitch · Vera Rubin 1994: Albert Overhauser · Frank Press 1995: Hans Dehmelt · Peter Goldreich 1996: Wallace S. Broecker 1997: Marshall Rosenbluth · Martin Schwarzschild · George Wetherill 1998: Don L. Anderson · John N. Bahcall 1999: James Cronin · Leo Kadanoff
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2000s
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2000: Willis E. Lamb · Jeremiah P. Ostriker · Gilbert F. White 2001: Marvin L. Cohen · Raymond Davis Jr. · Charles Keeling 2002: Richard Garwin · W. Jason Morgan · Edward Witten 2003: G. Brent Dalrymple · Riccardo Giacconi 2004: Robert N. Clayton 2005: Ralph A. Alpher · Lonnie Thompson 2006: Daniel Kleppner
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Persondata |
NAME |
Yau, Shing-Tung |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
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SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Mathematician |
DATE OF BIRTH |
1949-4-4 |
PLACE OF BIRTH |
Shantou, Guangdong Province, China |
DATE OF DEATH |
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PLACE OF DEATH |
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