Professor YAU Shing-Tung, a Chinese-born mathematician who won the 1982 Fields Medal for his work in differential geometry, visited USTC and gave a lecture On Dec 28, 2019.

In his lecture titled “Outline of Mathematics History”, professor YAU encouraged young researchers to tap mathematics history, in particular the mathematics development after the 18th century. “An overall grasp and reflection on the origin of mathematics is of significance for mathematics researchers to broaden horizon and enhance creativity,” said YAU.

Audience of the lecture (Image by the Office of International Cooperation and the School of Mathematical Sciences)

YAU Shing-Tung at the Forum of Great Minds (Image by the Office of International Cooperation and the School of Mathematical Sciences)

In the lecture that consisted of 41 modules concerning various branches of mathematics, YAU presented some of the most remarkable results in mathematics that had been made from the 16th century to the 20th century and shared his views with the audience. “The ocean of mathematics is vast as it embraces the arduous tasks of many mathematicians around the world. I expect my talk could give you a glimpse of mathematics vision,” said YAU.

Sketch of YAU Shing-Tung:
YAU Shing-Tung, an internationally renowned mathematician, received the Fields Medal of 1982for his work in global differential geometry and elliptic partial differential equations, particularly for solving such difficult problems as the Calabi conjecture of 1954 for both the Kähler and Einstein-Kähler metric cases, the positive mass conjecture (with Richard Schoen), and a problem of Hermann Minkowski’s concerning the Dirichlet problem for the real Monge-Ampère equation. YAU’s contributions have influenced both physics and mathematics, and he has been active at the interface between geometry and theoretical physics.

(Written by XU Yue, edited by JIANG Pengcen, USTC News Center)