World-renowned mathematician Professor Yau Shing-tung has been awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences 2023 for his contributions to mathematical physics and geometry.

Professor Yau graduated in mathematics from Chung Chi College of CUHK in 1969. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor-at-Large and Director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at CUHK, as well as Director of Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University. In April, he returned to his alma mater to give a talk at the Science Faculty’s Distinguished Lecture Series, sharing his life stories with a packed audience.

Rocky S. Tuan, CUHK Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President, congratulated Professor Yau. “The Shaw Prize is among the highest academic honours awarded in the country. We at CUHK are proud of him winning the prize,” he said. “On behalf of our staff and students, I’d like to send our heartfelt congratulations to Professor Yau and thank him for his dedication to nurturing maths talents over the years.”

Professor Yau developed systematically partial differential equation methods in differential geometry. With these, he solved the Calabi conjecture, the existence of Hermitian Yang–Mills connections, and the positive mass conjecture for which they used the theory of minimal surfaces. He introduced geometric methods to important problems in general relativity. He has also collaborated with astronomy, physics and philosophy experts at Harvard University to establish the “Black Hole Initiative”, the world’s first interdisciplinary centre exploring black holes.

Professor Vladimir Drinfeld, of the University of Chicago, was awarded the Shaw Prize in equal shares with Professor Yau.