Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau at Harvard University

Shing-Tung Yau ( Chinese  丘成桐 , Pinyin Qiū Chéngtóng , Jyutping Jau ¹ Sing ⁴ tung ⁴ , Yale Yau ¹ Sing ⁴ -Tung ⁴ ; born  April 4, 1949 in Shantou , Guangdong ) is an American - Chinese mathematician and poet who on in the field of differential geometry , especially the Calabi-Yau manifolds . In 1982 he was awarded the Fields Medal and in 2010 the Wolf Prize for Mathematics, and in 2018 the Marcel Grossmann Award .

Life

Yau grew up in a family of six siblings, his ancestors lived in Jiaoling (like his birthplace in Guandong). His father was a professor of Chinese philosophy and died when Yau was 14 years old. Under the influence of his father, he acquired a broad knowledge of classical Chinese literature and history. In 2006, he published an essay (數學 和 中國 文學 的 比較) to explain the structural relationship between mathematics and Chinese literature with reference to the Dream of the Red Chamber and Wang Guowei . He went to Hong Kong with his family and studied mathematics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1966 to 1969 . For his doctorate he went to the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his doctorate from Shiing-Shen Chern in 1971. He then went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a postdoc and was assistant professor at Stony Brook University for two years . In 1974 he became a professor at Stanford University . In 1979 he returned to the Institute for Advanced Study and was Professor at the University of California, San Diego from 1984 to 1987 . Since 1987 he has been a professor at Harvard University .

Yau has great influence and reputation in official bodies in China and founded mathematics institutes in Hong Kong, Beijing and Hangzhou. In 2016 he is also involved in the project of the world's largest particle accelerator in China. The long-term project worth billions (according to Yau, a project comparable to that of the Great Wall of China) is initially to implement an electron accelerator in an underground ring 100 km in length (CEPC) as a replacement for the linear accelerator ILC planned in Japan, for which China is to take over the financing. If enough experience is available, the tunnel will be used for a proton accelerator (SPPC, 100 TeV), which could compete with the successor to the LHC. The physicist and Nobel Prize winner Chen Ning Yang , who is also respected in China, had already criticized the project as a waste of money, since the research funds could be better used in other areas.

His PhD students include Huai-Dong Cao , Mu-Tao Wang , Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu , Gang Tian , Richard Schoen (as a second reviewer alongside Leon Simon ), Valentino Tosatti , Kefeng Liu .

Work

• In 1977 he proved a conjecture by Eugenio Calabi from 1954 that Kähler manifolds with vanishing first Chern class have Ricci flat metrics (i.e. vanishing Ricci curvature ). These manifolds, named after him and Calabi, play an important role in string theory .
• In 1979 he and his doctoral student Richard Schoen proved the positivity of energy in general relativity .
• In the 1990s, he made important contributions to mathematically rigorous justification of mirror symmetry ( mirror symmetry ) of Calabi-Yau manifolds, the first of physicists in string theory was discovered in 1991 (about the same time as Alexander Givental ).
• He was the chief organizer of Strings 2006 , an international string theory conference held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing .

Controversy over the Poincaré conjecture

An August 2006 article in The New Yorker alleged that Yau was downplaying Grigori Perelman's performance in proving the Poincaré Conjecture and exaggerating his own work or that of his colleagues in developing the evidence. Yau felt defamed by this article and threatened charges. The result was that the magazine did not withdraw any of the allegations, but neither were there any charges. Instead, Yau started a website in September 2006, on which he explained his position in more detail and also got strong support from renowned mathematicians. A little later, the Perelman affair was halfway resolved: while some colleagues continued to take a reserved attitude towards Yau, it was recognized that Yau brought the Perelman proof to a wider mathematical public by uncovering its true core.

Fonts

• Editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry . In 1982 he published a list of 120 open problems in differential geometry.
• Editor with Leung Geometry of special holonomy and related topics , International Press 2011
• Editor with Wolpert, Li Geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces , International Press 2009
• Editor with Gu Computational Conformal Geometry , International Press 2008
• Editor with Cao Geometric Flows , International Press 2008
• Tsing Hua Lectures on Geometry and Analysis , International Press 1997
• Editor Differential Geometry inspired by String Theory , International Press 1999
• Editor Essays on Mirror Manifolds , International Press 1992
• Edited by Mathematical Aspects of String Theory , World Scientific 1987
• with Steve Nadis: The shape of a life. One mathematician's search for the universe's hidden geometry , Yale UP 2019

Awards

Yau received several major awards. Among other things, the Fields Medal (1982), a Sloan Research Fellowship (1974), a MacArthur Fellowship (1985), the Oswald Veblen Prize (1981), the John J. Carty Award (1981), the Crafoord Prize ( 1994), the National Medal of Science (1997), the Wolf Prize (2010), and the Chern Prize (2019). In 1978 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Helsinki (The Role of Partial Differential Equations in Differential Geometry). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a member a. a. the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983) and the National Academy of Sciences (1993).

Web links

• Literature by and about Shing-Tung Yau in the catalog of the German National Library
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Shing-Tung Yau. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Shing-Tung Yau at Harvard University (English)
• "Shing-Tung Yau: The Emperor of Math" , New York Times , October 17, 2006
• Laudation for the Wolf Prize

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Johann Grolle, Kaiser der Mathematik, Der Spiegel No. 51, 2016, p. 122ff
2. ↑ Shing-Tung Yau in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ^ Yau, In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 74, 1977, p. 1798
4. ^ Schoen, Yau On the positive mass conjecture in general relativity , Commun. Math. Phys., Vol. 65, 1979, p. 45, Proof of the positive mass theorem. II , Commun. Math. Phys., Vol. 79, 1981, p. 231, expanded to include the Bondi mass by Schoen, Yau Proof that the Bondi mass is positive , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 48, 1982, p. 369
5. ↑ B. Lian, Liu and Yau: Mirror Symmetry I . In: Asian Journal of Mathematics . Volume 1, 1997, p. 729
6. ^ Sylvia Nasar, David Gruber: The Poincaré Clash . August 28, 2006, ISSN  0028-792X ( newyorker.com [accessed March 7, 2019]).
7. ↑ Shing-Tung Yau. Retrieved March 7, 2019 . 
8. ^ Dennis Overbye: Shing-Tung Yau: The Emperor of Math - Dennis Overbye . In: The New York Times . October 17, 2006, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed March 7, 2019]).
9. ^ Yau, Problem Section, in: Yau (Ed.), Seminar on Differential Geometry, Princeton UP, 1982, pp. 669-706