Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician known above all for his 1976 proof of the Calabi conjecture, a difficult problem in differential geometry originally proposed by mathematician Eugenio Calabi two decades earlier concerning the existence of a special class of curved geometric spaces with particular curvature properties. Yau spent several years working on the problem, at first attempting to disprove it before ultimately succeeding in proving that Calabi was right, establishing the existence of what are now called Calabi-Yau manifolds. In 1982, partly on the strength of this result, Yau became the first person of Chinese descent to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor. Although developed purely as an achievement in abstract mathematics, Calabi-Yau manifolds turned out several years later, beginning with work by physicists in 1985, to provide exactly the geometric structure needed to describe the extra hidden spatial dimensions required by string theory, a leading theoretical framework in physics that attempts to unify the fundamental forces of nature, and they have remained a central mathematical tool in that field ever since. Yau has held a long academic career, primarily at Harvard University, and beyond the Calabi conjecture he has made further influential contributions to geometric analysis, including work relevant to the mathematics of general relativity and black holes; he later also won the Wolf Prize, making him one of the few mathematicians to hold both of these top honors.