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Guest name: Recently, mathematics has become a bit popular, Ali math competition, and related online articles are like a tide. On April 30, Academician Yau Chengtong mentioned in a lecture at Huazhong University of Science and Technology that China's current mathematics has not yet reached the level of the 40s of the last century. This sentence also makes many people feel uneasy, but if you look at the top mathematicians that Academician Yau recalls when he was a doctoral student in the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton when he was a young man, he will feel that this sentence may still be conservative.
Academician Qiu's speech at Huazhong University of Science and Technology on April 30, 2024 was deafening
There is really nothing to say about mathematics, friendship will be wrong, love will collapse, only mathematics will not, mathematics will not be. In the view of Kemingjun, mathematics is a discipline that is particularly close to the way of heaven, because it has magical abstraction and universality. What kind of child will be loved by math and heaven?
Among Hakka mathematicians, the most famous Hakka mathematician in the world is Academician Yau Chengtong. In today's mathematical community, in terms of the breadth of research, the great influence, and the number of students, there is hardly anyone who can compare with this Chinese mathematician. Yau has won the Veblen Prize in Geometry (1981, aged 32), the Fields Medal (1982), the MacArthur Medal (1985), the Crawford Prize (1994), the National Medal of Science (1997), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2010), and the Marcel Grossman Prize (2018). He is the first Chinese to win the Fields Medal, the highest award in the international mathematical community, and the second Chinese to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics after Chern.
He is currently the Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Sciences (2003) and Director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Hong Kong Chinese University (1987), the Director of the Chengtong Yau Center for Mathematical Sciences at Tsinghua University, the Dean of Qiuzhen College, the Dean of the Yanqi Lake Institute of Applied Mathematics in Beijing, and the Chair Professor of Tsinghua University. Graduated from the Department of Mathematics, Chung Chi College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1969; He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971 under the supervision of Chern. From 1974 to 1987, he was a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the University of California, San Diego. He has been a professor of physics at Harvard University since 1987 and a professor of physics at Harvard University since 2013 (he is the first person to hold a professor of mathematics and physics at Harvard). He retired from Harvard in 2022 as a chair professor at Tsinghua University.
Yau Chengtong proved the Calabi Conjecture (27 years old), the positive mass conjecture, etc., and is the founder of the discipline of geometric analysis, and the Calabi-Yau manifold named after him is the basic concept of string theory in physics, and has made important contributions to the development of differential geometry and mathematical physics, and is the world's leading mathematician in differential geometry.
This article writes about how the mathematician Academician Yau Chengtong became interested in mathematics and embarked on the road of mathematics, based on the biography and reminiscences of Academician Yau.
The whole process seems to be accidental, because the cold door, migration, and upheaval constitute the main background of the youth life of this Hakka child; But it also contains inevitability, the professor's father, who respects literature and education, explores and advances mathematics, and a series of mentors and helpful friends, pave his way of mathematics that few people take.
Yau Chengtong's father, Qiu Zhenying, was born in Fushoutang in Yangyu Village, east of Baihu Village, Wenfu Town. During the Ming Dynasty (1464-1487), the eighth ancestor Weishu Qiu opened the infrastructure industry, which has been more than 500 years so far.
Jiaoling used to be called Zhenping, there are many mountains and few places, it is difficult to make a living, and after the recent floods, it is devastated everywhere, which shows that the environment here is not easy to survive.
It is precisely because it is not easy to survive, Jiaoling education has developed in history, string songs are endless, and talents have come out in large numbers, especially since the end of the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, Qiu Fengjia, Xie Jinyuan, Tu Sizong, Huang Kailu, etc. are all from Jiaoling.
Jiaoling Hill Chengtong ancestral residence
Like Yau's father, Qiu Zhenying, they stepped on the yellow mud of Jiaoling, but they began to look up at the sky at a young age, revisiting the religion, loving the country and the people, thinking about the future of the country like the Chinese Plato, and then putting their own future into it.
Yau is also a professor of philosophy with integrity and academic excellence. When Qiu Zhenying was a child, because his family was poor and had no money to buy paper, he went to the temple to pick up paper used to worship the gods and write.
He was able to memorize the Analects and Mencius at the age of five, entered the new school at the age of seven, was admitted to the military academy at the age of eighteen, and soon dropped out due to health problems, and later studied at Waseda University, where he received a master's degree at the age of twenty-two.
Qiu Zhenying is an admirable professor of literature, history and philosophy, who has taught history, philosophy, literature and other subjects. In his early thirties, he taught philosophy and history at Xiamen University, and after World War II, he worked for the United Nations Relief Administration.
Yau Chengtong's mother Liang Ruolin was born in a famous family and was the daughter of Liang Bocong, a famous Confucian in Meixian County, and Liang Bocong was the calligraphy and painting teacher of the painting giant Lin Fengmian. Liang Ruolin's grades were also very good, but due to tradition and war, she didn't study again after graduating from middle school.
Yau was born in Shantou on April 4, 1949, when Yau was working in Shantou. In the same year, Qiu Zhenying moved to Hong Kong with his family, and when he arrived in Hong Kong, he had little savings left.
And he has to support the whole family of 16 people, including the husband and wife and Yau Chengtong's eight brothers and sisters, an adopted sister, and Liang Ruolin's mother, seven brothers and sisters.
Qiu Zhenying got up early and worked late to work, held several temporary teaching positions, and his mother did needlework to supplement the family, making it very difficult to support the whole family, and occasionally borrowing money from others. These incomes often struggle to make ends meet, and children are poorly clothed and malnourished.
Yau started school at the age of five, and it was an hour's walk back and forth from home to school, which was very tiring. He was naughty and didn't like school until the third grade, but he liked the poetry, history, and philosophy that his father told him. From his father's lectures, he learned that he must understand the historical background of the problem, "summarizing the past is enough to provide clues for the future".
His father often urged Yau Chengtong and his brothers to practice calligraphy diligently, requiring them to recite Tang poems and Song Ci, memorize ancient texts, and read the works of philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Xiong Shili, and Tang Junyi. Later, Yau Chengtong recalled that these articles requested by his father have now become his attitude towards learning and life. These seem to have no connection with academic research, but the ideas contained in them have subtly and profoundly influenced academic research. Studying in school, he was also very impressed by the teacher's teaching of Fan Zhongyan's works. Later, Yau Chengtong himself rarely tutored his two sons in mathematics, and he often gave his sons cultural and Chinese classes.
Although naughty and playful, Yau Chengtong's academic performance jumped to second in the class in the fifth grade, but he almost abandoned his studies in the sixth grade. In junior high school, he was admitted to the tuition-free Pui Ching Secondary School in Hong Kong (founded in 1899), and later his alumni included Nobel Prize winner Cui Qi in physics, well-known mathematician Siu Yin Tong, and head of the Department of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Zheng Shaoyuan.
Yau Chengtong with his father
Peizheng's mathematics teacher is relatively high-level, and his father Qiu Zhenying, as a philosopher, also appreciates mathematics very much, and often encourages Yau Chengtong, these factors, Yau Chengtong's interest in mathematics is getting stronger and stronger.
Mathematics in the first year of junior high school was not challenging for him, but Liang Junwei, the teacher of the second year of junior high school, gave him his first taste of the beauty of mathematics. Mr. Liang taught Euclidean geometry, starting from five simple postules, and proved many theorems, which amazed him.
He began to meditate day and night on some geometric problems, such as asking a question of his own: Can a triangle be made only if one side, one angle, the length of the middle line, or the length of the divinal line of a triangle can only be made with a ruler and a compass?
Every Saturday after school, he would read math books in a bookstore in Kowloon, only to realize that the problem he was asking was similar to the classic old problem asked by mathematicians hundreds of years ago.
Yau Chengtong was dressed in old and thin clothes, took his mother's food for lunch, was thin and pale, and was often ridiculed and teased by his classmates. His grades in physical education and music were not good, his hair was still standing on end, and some of the teachers didn't like him, which made the teenager uncomfortable, but he didn't care much about it, and seemed to be very obtuse with them. Sometimes when he was annoyed, he used the longboard of mathematics to help his classmates who teased him, and later gradually gained the favor of his classmates.
After communicating with him in the second year of junior high school, his Chinese teacher, Ms. Pan Yanxia, found that he was thinly dressed and poorly nourished, so she sent him milk powder and other foods to replenish his body. He was touched by his teacher and determined not to disappoint him, and began to study hard.
But when he was in his third year of junior high school, his sister Chenghu contracted an illness and died. In the same year, his father, Yau Chun-ying, who was the head of the departments of philosophy, Chinese history and Chinese at Heung Kong College, resigned due to corruption in the school's leadership, and his chair at Chung Chi College of Hong Kong Chinese University was also insecured. At that time, Ling Daoyang, the president of Chongji, was forced to resign due to personnel overthrow (also Hakka. Hong Kong Chinese one of the founders of the University), and Yau Zhenying is a close confidant of Dean Ling.
Ling Daoyang (1888-1993)
A series of blows caused Qiu Zhenying's income to plummet, he was depressed, and soon fell ill, and died suddenly soon after. The pillar of the family fell, and this great change put Yau's family in a difficult situation, with no income and rent arrears.
After the sudden death of his father, 14-year-old Yau Chengtong changed his past laziness, decided that academic success was the only way out, and was determined to make a name for himself academically. A strong desire arose in his heart to make his heavenly father proud of him.
Qiu Zhenying taught the children to be upright, to work hard, and to look at everything from the front. He said: In addition to material desires, there are many things worth pursuing in life.
Yau Chengtong memorized many poems taught by his father to heal his sorrows and get through difficult days. He began to read the difficult philosophical books on his father's bookshelf, hoping to understand the content of his father's thinking, experience the traces of his thinking, and find solace.
The uncle, who had a wealthy family and a Catholic school, offered to let them drop out of school to work on his farm and help him raise ducks. The move was rejected by Yau's mother, Liang Ruolin. She hopes that the children will study hard and achieve academic success according to their father's wishes. She is not afraid to raise funds to keep her children in school. She herself had been malnourished and anemic for many years, but she struggled to feed her children.
Qiu Zhenying's funeral was handled with the help of Ling Daoyang, Qian Mu, Zhang Fakui and others. The eldest sister, who was studying in the UK, read the news of her father's death in the newspaper.
Her mother, Liang Ruolin, was only 43 years old at the time, and she was frail and sickly, and she shouldered the burden of raising eight children alone with forbearance and perseverance.
After my father's funeral, my mother moved the family to a cheap place with a pigsty next to it. Not only does it stink, but it's also farther away from the school, and you have to walk for more than an hour before taking the train for a long time. Fortunately, his father's student Li Jinrong opened a primary school near Peizheng and let Yau Chengtong stay overnight.
Yau Chengtong was able to return home once every two weeks, and he would also help take care of primary school students. Every night he slept in the classroom, lying on a long and narrow desk, using the desk as a bed, and there was a toilet on the same floor that was very smoky, and he had to endure it. Decades later, he still remembered that the toilet wall read: It is better to bully the white beard than to bully the poor youth.
Because he didn't have to travel far, and not many people came to him, he had plenty of time to read after school, and then spent the night alone on an empty classroom desk, and so on for more than a year.
Later, her sister Cheng Yao gave up the opportunity to go to college and earn money to support her family. Yau Chengtong himself began to work as a tutor to subsidize the family. Thanks to the family's efforts and the help of some of their father and students, they were able to leave the "pig house" and find a place with a stream in Sha Tin to build a small one-bedroom home for a family of seven. This small home has no electricity or water, and there are occasional poisonous snakes, but it is close to the school, Yau Chengtong can finally live with his family, and his mother can also raise chickens, ducks and grow vegetables around.
Beginning in 1964, fifteen-year-old Yau Chengtong began to tutor people in mathematics to supplement his family. He used a completely unique method of tutoring children who were only a few years younger than him in math, helping a sixth-grader go from failing a math test to a perfect score in less than a month. In the process of tutoring and explaining, in order to make it easier for students to understand, he had to understand more deeply, and inadvertently used the Feynman method.
He has to tutor others, and he has to excel in his studies. When he was a freshman in high school, he read several books of number theory by Hua Luogeng, which made him enter the palace of advanced mathematics and opened his eyes. These books allowed him to see the direction in the despair and emptiness of his father's departure, and to sense the call of mathematics.
In his sophomore year of high school, he began to study calculus, and the methods of Newton and Leibniz 350 years ago were still the main tools of mathematics and physics, which made Yau Chengtong admire in his heart.
Inspired by his lecturer Elmer Brody, he became interested in functional analysis, read many functional works, and wrote to Cadison of the University of Pennsylvania and Siegel at MIT, asking them for copies of their papers. This teenage high school student later learned that these were all authoritative figures in the world of mathematics. Years later, Yau Chengtong became good friends with them.
In his third year of high school, Yau Chengtong was admitted to the Chinese University of Hong Kong while tutoring his father's student Li Borong's nephew. Chancellor Chomian Lee is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Yau chose Chung Chi College, where his father taught, and enrolled in 1966, where his elder brother Cheng Yu also studied.
The math class in his freshman year was too easy for him, and he was allowed by the department to only take exams and not attend classes. He made time for more difficult lessons, such as the line generation and the high-level. Mr. Zhou Qinglin holds a master's degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the United Kingdom.
Yau Chengtong learned the Dedejin division method in Zhou Qinglin's class. Dedekin was a disciple of Gauss and a contemporary of Riemann. Dedekin's method starts with integers that are familiar to elementary school students, and constructs all real numbers, such as rational and irrational numbers. The magic of this method made Yau Chengtong excited.
He wrote a letter to his teacher, Zhou Qinglin, to express his appreciation for mathematics, saying: "I finally understand the beauty of mathematics! This made Mr. Zhou very appreciative, and the two often exchanged mathematics. In Chongji, Yau also studied Chinese, English, Japanese, physics, and philosophy. He benefited greatly from his philosophical approach to the world.
Principal Lee Cho-man has brought several young mathematicians from his alma mater, Berkeley, to Chung Chi College. One of them, Professor Salaf, is accustomed to teaching calculus in the American style, encouraging students to ask questions and discuss in class, casually and naturally. Sometimes the teacher will get stuck, and then Yau Chengtong will help.
Later, Yau also helped Mr. Salaf prepare handouts or help with classes. The teacher also asked him to organize the lecture notes and co-write a textbook. At this time, Yau Chengtong was still a 17-year-old boy. In the process of writing the book, Yau Chengtong read all the mathematical literature in the bibliography!
In 1968, when he was a freshman, Yau taught Tai Chi to professors at Chung Chi College
During this period, Yau mainly relied on scholarships to go to university. But because his Chinese grades were mediocre at that time, the scholarship was only half of that of others, and Professor Salaf, who knew his family background, was upset for him. Teacher Lu Huiqing from Chung Chi Physical Education Department proposed another way for him to make money - teaching Tai Chi to teachers inside and outside the school. So the math genius opened up this traditional skill point and easily earned some pocket money.
In his sophomore year, Yau took an algebra class taught by Knight at the University of Cambridge, which was very exciting. After the course, Knight also gave Yau the original manuscript of his doctoral dissertation.
Zhou Qinglin, Saraf, and Knight all thought that Yau was a mathematical genius. But Yau never liked the word genius, believing that solving mathematical problems requires hard work and no shortcuts. As for solving math puzzles like the MIT cleaner in "Soul Catcher" with a broom thrown away, he had never seen it. As for what constitutes a genius, it is not interesting to think about it at all.
Based on Yau's performance, the mathematics departments of Chung Chi, United and New Asia College set up a committee to suggest to President Lee Chok-man that Yau should graduate early. President Lee asked him to visit the most famous mathematician in Hong Kong at that time, Professor Wong Yong-chan of the University of Hong Kong, to assess whether he was a genius or not. Professor Huang showed the Glassmann manifold he was calculating, but Yau was not interested. In the end, the school did not let Yau Chengtong graduate early.
Yau Chengtong did not dwell on this, but completed all the four-year subject requirements in three years. In 1969, at the beheav of Professor Salaf, the university finally gave Yau Chengtong, a junior, a diploma, but did not give him an undergraduate degree certificate.
Professor Salaf and Yau Chengtong studied the story of Hua Luogeng's fame in the mathematics world without a degree. Yau Chengtong was deeply moved.
It was Professor Salaf who suggested that Yau Chengtong go to his alma mater, Berkeley, to study for a doctorate, and also recommended Saracen, a teacher in the department, and won a generous scholarship for Yau. Berkeley opened his arms to the Chinese student, who was a junior in college.
Yau later recalled this critical moment in his life, and was very grateful to Salaf, Salson, and Professor Shochi Kobayashi and Professor Chern Shiingshen at Berkeley at that time.
His mother was also happy that Yau Chengtong went to the United States for further study. But this year, Yau Chengtong's brother Cheng Yu had a brain tumor, and his mother stayed alone to take care of Cheng Yu. Although Yau could not bear to leave his mother and brother, he "felt strongly that he had to struggle to become famous" and that he had to seize this once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity to meet the challenges that were coming. He promised his mother that he would write letters to his family regularly and send money home every month.
In early September 1969, at the age of 20, Yau Chengtong flew to the United States, full of longing for a mathematical journey. He only brought a suitcase, and left all the math books he had bought over the years to his younger brother Cheng Dong, who later enrolled in Chongji and later became an accomplished scholar. Born in Hong Kong in 1952, Yau later served as a distinguished professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, director of the Information Control Laboratory at the university, an IEEE Fellow, and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Algebraic Geometry and Communications in Information and Systems.
When he arrived at Berkeley, Yau sent half of his monthly scholarship to his mother. I wake up at 7 a.m. every morning, and after eating, I stay in the classroom, library, or lecture hall in the math building all day. Read only and don't play every day. Because he found that Berkeley's mathematics department had a rich and vast curriculum, compared to the small Chung Chi College in Hong Kong, it was like a small pond.
Eager to recoup lost time, he threw himself into the ocean of mathematics at Berkeley every day. Interestingly, perhaps influenced by his father, he thought of Confucius as a teacher in his heart, and felt that this teacher would always see if he was satisfied with his academic performance.
He studied hard as Confucius said: "I don't eat all day long, I don't sleep all night, thinking is useless, it's better to learn." Qu Yuan is his father's favorite poet, and he uses Qu Yuan's poems to inspire himself: The road is long, and I will go up and down to seek.
Berkeley Hidden Dragon Crouching Tiger, there are many rising stars among his classmates. Yau plunged headlong into Berkeley's math ocean, reading, attending classes, and attending seminars. "Like a half-starved person, suddenly faced with a buffet of casual eating and drinking, I swallowed it all. This is done out of desire and ability on the one hand. ”
Mathematics became his sole focus. He often saves time for lunch, and after eating a sandwich, he goes back to class.
In his first semester at Berkeley, Yau took Spanier's Algebraic Topology, Lawson's Differential Geometry, and Morry's Differential Equations, and also audited courses on algebra, number theory, group theory, dynamical systems, automorphism, and functional analysis.
Algebraic topology is completely new to him by turning topological problems into algebraic problems. He was a little nervous in class at first, mainly listening to the other students' enthusiastic speeches. He quickly read the professor's textbook in a few weeks, and found that many of his classmates were bragging.
Lawson's classes inspired his interest in geometry. When he arrived at Berkeley, his perception of mathematics was completely different from that of high school, and he had planned to study the operator algebra in abstract functional analysis, but later found that geometry presented perfect structures, from which he could see the fusion of mathematics and nature, and he could draw structures.
His interest in geometry grew and was heavily influenced by Maury's lessons in differential equations. Professor Murray's lecture notes were very difficult, and students were asked to give presentations, and many students could not move. Yau found differential equations very useful, because the main laws of physics are presented in partial differential equations. He worked very this course and learned a lot.
He believed that geometry and topology describe local curvature, i.e., local geometrically and spatially precise shapes, and a generalized shape that describes macroscopically, the same space; They have long been considered two disciplines, but they can actually be used to depict the same entity and should not be separated. An idea began to come to his mind to connect concrete geometry with abstract topology using partial differential equations as a latitude.
This idea of his was summed up on the basis of extensive and in-depth reading of his predecessors. Gausborne's theorem connects the curvature of geometry with the topology of surfaces, and Poincaré, Hopf, and Chern all make these connections more stable.
On these basis, Yau further introduced nonlinear differential equations. Essentially, geometry and topology are both descriptions of shapes.
Topologically, an inflated balloon is a spherical and is equivalent to an uninflated balloon. Geometrically, the exact curvature of a round balloon and a deflated balloon is different. Therefore, curvature is the key to generalized shapes (topology) and precise shapes (geometry), and this is also true in the case of high dimensions.
Curvature also plays an important role in physics. Scientists can determine the mass of a particle by analyzing the curvature of the path, and thus determine what particles are. Einstein's theory of relativity, which describes the curvature of the universe, consists of a set of nonlinear differential equations, and a small change in one variable can lead to significant consequences.
Linearity, that is, it conforms to proportions and is stackable. But our world is non-linear. The trajectory of life is the same, from the "curvature" of each key turning point, you can know the outline of the whole life.
Yau wanted to combine geometry, topology, and nonlinear analysis. At that time, he found that the authority of these disciplines, the non-linear Murray, and the geometric Chern had little exchange. Yau Chengtong had the idea of knotting these separate threads together.
This may be due to the philosophical input of his father, Qiu Zhenying, during his youth. In Yau's recollections, philosophy made his thinking more highly and transparent.
It was 1969, Yau was 20 years old, and he went to Berkeley for half a year. Many students and teachers have participated in anti-Vietnamese demonstrations and class strikes. Yau Chengtong was a newcomer, did not understand the situation, and insisted on attending class without distraction, becoming the only student in Professor Murray's class to attend class. Master Professor Murray also insisted on the class, and continued to lecture in a suit for his only student, as if facing a class, but the content of the lesson was tailor-made for Yau Chengtong. He became one of Berkeley's 30,000 lucky people to listen to a master's one-on-one lecture.
Later, when Mr. Salaf returned to the United States, he often invited him to meetings. At gatherings in the United States, marijuana smoke spread everywhere, and smoking marijuana cigarettes was common in Berkeley at that time, but Yau Chengtong declined. His education from an early age kept him from this indulgent lifestyle. He was a drinker and had no bearing on the hippie lifestyle that was all the rage in Los Angeles at the time. He grew up in an environment where people worked tirelessly to earn a living, and opium-like recreational drugs had no place in them. The simplicity of material things has given birth to the height and depth of thinking.
On the Christmas day of the first year of research, Yau Chengtong spent two weeks alone in the library of the Department of Mathematics, wandering through mathematics papers and having fun. Here he read a lot of Euler's writings and discovered a treatise by Mirno on curvature and elementary groups.
Yau linked the paper to what he heard in a chat with Professor Turner-Smith at Chung Chi College in Hong Kong, and found the relevant paper, and completed his first meaningful proof and wrote the paper. After the vacation, he spoke to Dr. Lawson. The Annals of Mathematics accepted his paper, which was in 1970.
Yau's paper cleverly solved the famous "Wolf conjecture" at the time. His ingenious solution to this problem made the world mathematical community at that time aware of the emergence of a new star in mathematics.
The following year as a graduate student, Yau Chengtong chose Chen as his mentor. The rest of the story is that Yau Chengtong continued to read wildly in the library, read through the papers, discussed the academic direction with the professor, and then wrote a paper on the Calabi conjecture, and became famous.
Yau Chengtong and his mentor Chern Shiingshen
Mr. Chan asked Yau to give a presentation on an article published in the Annals of Mathematics on Presman's work. The report went well, and after the meeting, Chern consulted with others, and the response was very good, which was enough for Yau's doctoral dissertation, and in 1971, at the age of 23, Yau graduated with a doctorate
Sometimes he is faced with a variety of value choices, he remembers the "Biography of Mr. Wuliu" taught by his father when he was ten years old, Mr. Wuliu lives in a dilapidated house surrounded by bleak and unsheltered from the wind. Mr. Wuliu, who likes to read, forgets the gains and losses.
In the course of his studies, he remembered his father's repeated teachings to pursue and discover the truth and beauty in his desired realm. He took his father's teachings as the yardstick for living in the world, and his truth and beauty were in the field of mathematics, and compared with the study of mathematics, material things, fame and fortune have always seemed insignificant, and they have never caused any trouble to him.
But he will find a way to make his studies not affected by having to work hard to make money through a variety of skill points and moderate frugality. For example, he often cooks for himself, including teaching in the Department of Mathematics at Stony Brook University in 1972 after graduating from his Ph.D. Simmons, then head of Stony Brook's mathematics department, later became a famous hedge fund manager, and many years later made fun of Yau's frugality: Look at Yau, go home and cook again!
Values are important to a mathematician. Yau Chengtong never wasted time on meaningless choices, also because of his father's philosophical teachings in his early years.
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1954, the 31-year-old mathematician Calabi wrote down his famous conjecture on one page in the invitation to the conference: if M is a compact Kahler manifold, then there is a unique Calle metric in any of its first class (1,1) form R, and its Ricci form happens to be R. Calabi also roughly describes a proof scheme for his conjecture and proves that if a solution exists, it must be unique.
Translated into human terms, there is a gravitational field with no material distribution in an enclosed space. In the decades since Calabi conjecture, no one has been able to solve this puzzle.
Yau Chengtong, who had just graduated with a Ph.D., was deeply interested in this extremely challenging problem and began to study day and night. took a lot of detours, but there was no result. To prove this function, he tried nearly 5,000 experimental functions to develop techniques for estimating gradients on manifolds.
In 1976, Yau Chengtong, who was immersed in the sweetness of his newlyweds, suddenly had an idea to find a solution to the Calabi conjecture: he mastered the concept of curvature in Kahlabi geometry and proved the Calabi conjecture by solving this extremely difficult partial differential equation. This proof caused a sensation in the mathematical community, and the 27-year-old Yau Chengtong became famous in one fell swoop.
After that, Yau Chengtong solved a series of world-class mathematical problems, such as the Smith conjecture, the Einstein conjecture, the Dirichlet problem of the Simonger-Ampère equation, the Minkowski problem, the mirror conjecture, and the correspondence between stability and special metrics. The Calabi-Yau manifold, named after his research, has played an important role in mathematics and theoretical physics.
In 1978, he was invited to give an academic report entitled "The Role of Partial Differential Equations in Differential Geometry" at the World Congress of Mathematics held in Finland. This report represents the research direction, method and mainstream of differential geometry around the 80s of the 20th century. After that, he solved a series of problems in the field of mathematics, such as "positive mass guessing".
1979, California Outstanding Scientist of the Year; In 1981, he won the Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society, one of the highest awards in the world of differential geometry. In 1982, at the age of 33, Yau Chengtong won the Fields Medal, which is the world's Nobel Prize in mathematics.
Yau Chengtong in 1982 (first from right)
As the leader of the world's new generation of differential geometry, Yau attended the 1989 American Mathematical Society Conference on Differential Geometry in Los Angeles.
In 1994, he won the "Cliveford Prize", an international award specially established by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to make up for the lack of a mathematics prize in the Nobel Prize.
Three years later, the President of the United States personally presented him with the National Medal of Science. In 2010, he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (known as the "Mathematician's Lifetime Achievement Award") for his contributions to several fields, including geometric analysis and physics. He is the second Chinese to receive the Wolf Prize in Mathematics after his mentor Chern.
Yau won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Medal, and the Cliveford Prize, and is known as the "King of Mathematics". Only two mathematicians in history have won these three awards, the other being the Belgian mathematician Deligne.
In 2010, Yau won the Wolf Prize
After the reform and opening up, Yau Chengtong visited China in 1979 at the invitation of mathematician Hua Luogeng, and then he began to recruit doctoral students from China.
In order to help develop mathematics education in China, Yau Chengtong tried all kinds of ways to study mathematics problems. Since 1993, Yau has established a number of mathematics research institutes in Hong Kong Chinese University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University, and has now spread to many universities across the country. In order to enhance the exchange and cooperation of Chinese mathematicians, Yau initiated the organization of the International Conference of Chinese Mathematicians.
In 2004, Yau first established the biennial Hang Lung Mathematics Award in Hong Kong for Hong Kong secondary school students, in order to stimulate the interest and creativity of secondary school students in mathematics research and to cultivate and discover young mathematical geniuses. In 2008, Yau established the "Yau Science Award" in China to encourage research-based learning.
Yau Chengtong always carries the feelings of family and country. Since 1984, he has recruited more than a dozen doctoral students from China to train talents in differential geometry for the motherland. Since 1979, he has given high-quality lectures to the Chinese Academy of Sciences many times. In order to help develop Chinese mathematics, Yau Chengtong tried all kinds of methods. He raised funds to establish the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chinese Hong Kong, China, the Morningside Mathematics Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Mathematical Science Research Center of Zhejiang University, and the Yau Chengtong Center for Mathematical Sciences of Tsinghua University.
At the same time, he initiated the International Conference of Chinese Mathematicians, which greatly enhanced the prestige of Chinese mathematicians in the world. Most of the more than 70 PhDs he has trained are Chinese, and many of them are already very outstanding mathematicians in the world. For his outstanding contribution to the development of mathematics in China, he won the 2003 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People's Republic of China.
On December 22, 2018, Yau Chengtong was in Jiaoling
On December 22, 2018, the Calabi-Yau Chengtong Space Sculpture was officially unveiled to the world in Jiaoling, Meizhou, and the International Conference on the Forty Years of Calabi-Yau Theory Development was held in Jiaoling County, Meizhou City
Yau Chengtong has won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Medal, and the Cliveford Prize, and is known as the "king of mathematics". Only two mathematicians in history have won these three awards, the other being the Belgian mathematician Deligne. He has also received the U.S. National Medal of Science from the President of the United States. He is the first Chinese to win the Fields Medal, the highest award in the international mathematical community, and the second Chinese to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics after Chern.
Academician Qiu said: I don't think winning awards is the goal of life, the success of doing research itself is a very good harvest, Wall Street can give me a lot of money, give me more than ten times the salary, for me to make so much money what's the benefit, I don't care about big houses, luxury cars, it doesn't matter to me.
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