On the evening of January 31, Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau received a letter personally signed by Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli Minister of Education and Chairman of the Wolf Foundation. The letter informed him that he had been awarded the 2010 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his “contributions to geometric analysis which have had a profound and dramatic impact on many areas of geometry and physics.”
The Wolf Prize, which began in 1978, is awarded annually to individuals who have achieved outstanding results in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. Among these, the Wolf Prize in Mathematics is highly influential.
This year’s award ceremony is scheduled for May 13 in Jerusalem. Shing-Tung Yau will share the $100,000 mathematics prize with American mathematician Dennis Sullivan. This marks the second time Yau has received a top international mathematics award, following his Fields Medal. To date, there are only 13 recipients who have won both the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize.
The Award
Yang Le, a famous mathematician and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said in an interview with a reporter from Science Times: “The Fields Medal is primarily awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40, while the Wolf Prize is in the nature of a lifetime achievement award. In addition to these, Shing-Tung Yau has also received the Crafoord Prize, which was established by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to fill the gaps in the Nobel Prize categories; the mathematics prize is only awarded once every six years. Previously, only the mathematician Pierre Deligne had won all three prizes; Shing-Tung Yau is the second person to do so. Furthermore, he has received many other famous awards in the mathematical community. All of this demonstrates that Yau’s work is indeed exceptionally outstanding.”
The citation for this year’s Wolf Prize noted that Shing-Tung Yau has been extremely “prolific” for decades. Yau was once hailed by the international mathematical master Simon Donaldson as the “most influential mathematician of the last quarter-century.” He has solved a series of conjectures and major problems, such as the Calabi conjecture, the positive mass conjecture, the Minkowski problem, the mirror conjecture, and the correspondence between stability and special metrics. Yau is the founder of the discipline of geometric analysis, and his work has far-reaching implications. His research has had a significant impact on several fields of modern mathematics and theoretical physics, including differential geometry, partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, and algebraic topology. The “Calabi–Yau” manifolds, named after him and Eugenio Calabi, have become a fundamental concept frequently used in mathematics and theoretical physics.
The Wolf Prize citation also mentioned that, beyond his academic achievements, Shing-Tung Yau “has had a huge influence on mathematical research worldwide because he has trained a large number of graduate students and established several active mathematical research centers.”
Overview
Shing-Tung Yau (born April 4, 1949) is of Hakka descent, with ancestral roots in Jiaoling County, Meizhou, Guangdong Province. He was born in Shantou and raised in Hong Kong. He is a world-renowned mathematician. Yau has long been committed to promoting mathematical research and talent cultivation in China. In 1979, he visited China for the first time at the invitation of Mr. Hua Luogeng, the former director of the Institute of Mathematics of the CAS. In the 1980s, he visited the Institute of Mathematics several times for academic exchanges and was appointed as an honorary member of its academic committee. Since the 1990s, the connection has become even closer. In 1994, Yau was elected as one of the first foreign academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2003, nominated by the CAS, Yau received the International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award of the People’s Republic of China.
Yang Le revealed: “Lu Yongxiang, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has already sent a congratulatory telegram to Shing-Tung Yau, warmly congratulating him on receiving the prestigious Wolf Prize.”
Yau has established several mathematical research institutions in China. In 1994, he established the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; in 1996, he established the Morningside Center of Mathematics at the CAS; in 2002, he established the Mathematical Sciences Center at Zhejiang University; and in December last year, he established another mathematical center at Tsinghua University. As the mathematical center Yau has been involved with for the longest time in mainland China, the Morningside Center has received much of his effort. Yang Le said: “The reason the Morningside Center is so named is that Yau contacted his friends in Hong Kong and obtained funding support from the Hong Kong Morningside Group.” According to scholars at the Morningside Center, Yau visits the center multiple times every year. Even when he is not there, he often cares about the center’s work and project progress through emails and phone calls. “When he is busy, there are several emails and long-distance calls a day.”
What impressed Yang Le was that at a meeting at the Morningside Center in 1997, Yau specifically asked the geometric analysis group to pay attention to Richard Hamilton’s work. Hamilton’s work was the most important path leading to the final solution of the Poincaré conjecture. “If young scholars follow Yau’s ideas, they can grow very quickly.”
Yau attaches great importance to arithmetic algebraic geometry. Arithmetic algebraic geometry is a very important branch of modern mathematics, but this field was almost a blank in China and many Asian countries in previous years. Through Yau’s vigorous advocacy, the Morningside Center has carried out many research activities. “Now there is already good research work and talent in this field in China,” Yang Le said.
The Morningside Center has hosted many important international academic conferences, such as the International Congress of Mathematicians and the String Theory Conference. It has also organized international exchanges of various scales, including public lectures by famous scholars like Stephen Hawking for five or six thousand people, academic conferences for hundreds of people, and small seminars and specialized research for dozens of people. Yang Le said: “After participating in Morningside’s activities, many scholars from home and abroad have given very high evaluations. This is inseparable from Shing-Tung Yau’s efforts and contributions.”
Yau’s Award Was Not Hit by Newton’s Apple
In many reports about Mr. Yau, we often see words like “early success,” “genius mathematician,” and “extraordinary ability.” While these introduce Mr. Yau’s outstanding mathematical abilities to the public, they can also easily mislead readers into thinking that his achievements mainly come from his extraordinary talent. In fact, Mr. Yau himself disagrees with this. In his article The Evolution of Mathematics, he said: “The media or general biographers like to say someone is a genius, writing with ease as if scholarship can be achieved overnight. In fact, whether in literature or mathematics, it requires deep thinking to produce works that will be passed down through generations.”
Mr. Yau’s conquest of the Calabi conjecture is a good example. In 1973, Yau began to challenge this conjecture. Initially, he tried to prove that the Calabi conjecture was wrong. After dozens of failures, he adjusted his thinking and turned to prove that the conjecture was correct. This proof lasted for four long years, during which he lived alone and worked until the early hours of the morning every day. It can be said that the reason Mr. Yau achieved such fruitful results is related to his talent, but more importantly, it comes from his high enthusiasm for mathematical research and his tireless dedication.
For a long time, people in China have delighted in the story of “Newton’s Apple”: one day in the 1660s, Newton was sitting under an apple tree meditating when an apple fell and hit him squarely on the head, giving him a sudden burst of inspiration that led to the discovery of the “Law of Universal Gravitation.” There are many similar stories, such as Archimedes discovering “Archimedes’ Principle” while bathing, “Kekulé discovering the benzene ring in a dream,” and “Watt inventing the steam engine after seeing the lid of a boiling kettle.” These fairy-tale-like stories in the history of science highlight the great charm of a “flash of inspiration” in scientific discovery, but they ignore the fact that “inspiration” does not arise for no reason; it must be based on persistent and hard work.
Sources
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