Shing-Tung YAU, foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, won the 2010 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his achievements in geometry and physics.

The Wolf Prize in Mathematics is awarded almost annually by the Wolf Foundation. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Wolf Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Arts.

The award ceremony will be held in Jerusalem, Israel on May 13 this year. YAU will share the 100,000 U.S. dollars' prize with American mathematician Dennis P. Sullivan.

Until the establishment of the Abel Prize, the Wolf Prize was probably the closest equivalent of a "Nobel Prize in Mathematics", since the more prestigious Fields Medal was (and still is) only awarded every 4 years to mathematicians under 40.

Shing-Tung YAU is a Chinese American mathematician working in differential geometry. He was born on April 4, 1949 in Shantou, Guangdong province, China. His work has led to the important Calabi-YAU manifolds, which are the basic building blocks of the universe, according to String Theory. He developed and put the field of differential equations on manifolds into the mainstream of mathematics, and his work on minimal manifolds has applications to topology and general relativity theory.

YAU has made first-rate contributions to, and lasting impacts on, both physics and mathematics. Calabi-YAU manifolds are among the 'standard toolkit' for string theorists today. He has been very active in the exciting interface between geometry and theoretical physics. His proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity finally demonstrated—sixty years after its discovery—that Einstein’s theory is consistent and stable. His proof of the Calabi conjecture allowed physicists—using Calabi-YAU compactification—to show that string theory is a viable candidate for a unified theory of nature.

YAU has received a number of awards. These include the Fields Medal in 1982 "for his contributions to partial differential equations, to the Calabi conjecture in algebraic geometry, to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity theory, and to real and complex Monge-Ampère equations", a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, the Crafoord Prize in 1994, the (U.S.) National Medal of Science in 1997.

YAU is one of the 13 mathematicians that win both the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.