【6/24/2021】CAPA-NoVA Distinguished Chinese American (华裔名人) Project
(Author: Laura Guo)
姚期智(Andrew Chi-Chih Yao)(1946 – ) is a Chinese American Computer Scientist who won the A.M. Turing Award, the highest achievement in computer science, in 2000 for his “fundamental contributions to the theory of computation [computational complexity], including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity”[1]. He has also done significant research in the analysis of algorithms and quantum computing.
Yao received a bachelor’s degree in physics from National Taiwan University in 1967, and then a master’s (1969) and PhD (1972) in physics from Harvard University. Then, he completed another doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. After that, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975-76), Stanford University (1976-81; 82-86), University of California, Berkeley (1981-82), and Princeton University (1986-2004) where he was the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. In 2004, he became the professor of the Center for Advanced Study and director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. In 2010, he was also elected the Dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua. Since 2005, he is also a Distinguished Professor at Large at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Furthermore, he is also part of “the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; 1995), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the Academia Sinica (2000), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2003), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2004)”[2]. Yao has written more than 120 published research papers and served as an editor for many journals, including the managing editor of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Computing (1989–91). Besides the Turing Award, he has also won the “SIAM George Pólya Prize (1987), the ACM Donald E. Knuth Prize (1996), and the Pan Wen-Yuan Foundation Research Award (2003),” among others[2].
Throughout his lengthy career in academia, Yao has done remarkable work and proved again and again how far intelligence and dedication can go. His vast and lasting contributions to many areas such as “the foundations of cryptography, computer security, computational complexity and randomized computation” make him a key contributor to the field of computer science as we know it[1].
[1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/yao_1611524.cfm
[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Chi-Chih-Yao
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yao#cite_note-Yao_Turing-4
[4] https://iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/yao/
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