Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a Chinese computer scientist and theoretical physicist who earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1972 under Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow before completing a second PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, and who has served as professor and dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University since 2004 after earlier faculty positions at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton. Yao made foundational contributions to computational complexity and cryptography, including Yao principle, a technique for proving lower bounds on the performance of randomized algorithms, the theory of communication complexity, the Dolev-Yao model for analyzing the security of cryptographic protocols, and the technique of garbled circuits used in secure multiparty computation. He also formulated Yao Millionaires Problem, a foundational question in secure computation asking how two parties can compare their wealth without revealing the actual amounts to each other. Yao received the ACM Turing Award in 2000 and the Knuth Prize in 1996, and he became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences after renouncing his American citizenship in 2015.