Horng-Tzer Yau

The native form of this personal name is Yau Horng-Tzer. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Horng-Tzer Yau (Chinese: 姚鴻澤; pinyin: Yáo Hóngzé; born 1959 in Taiwan) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician.

Yau at Oberwolfach, 2011

Education

He received his B.S. in 1981 from National Taiwan University and his Ph.D. in 1987 from Princeton University. His Ph.D. thesis Stability of Coulomb Systems was supervised by Elliott Lieb.^[1]

Academic career

Yau joined the faculty of NYU in 1988, and became a full professor at its Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1994. He moved to Stanford in 2003, and then to Harvard University in 2005. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1987–88, 1991–92, and 2003, and was a distinguished visiting professor in 2013–14.^[2]

According to William C. Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, "Professor Yau is a leader in the fields of mathematical physics, ... who has introduced important tools and concepts to study probability, stochastic processes, nonequilibrium statistical physics, and quantum dynamics."^[3]

Yau is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow.

Honors

• Simons Investigator Award^[4]
• Sloan Foundation Fellowship
• Packard Foundation Fellowship, 1991
• International Congress of Mathematicians, 1998^[5]
• Henri Poincaré Prize, 2000
• MacArthur Fellowship, 2000^[6]
• Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics, 2001^[7]
• Academician of the Academia Sinica, 2002^[8]
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences^[9]
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012^[10]
• Simons Investigator, 2012^[11]
• Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Mathematical Physics
• the 2017 Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics & Physics^[12]