The Shing-Tung and Yu-Yun Yau Endowed Lecture in Mathematics
The Shing-Tung and Yu-Yun Yau Endowed Lecture in Mathematics was established through a generous donation from Professor Shing-Tung Yau (Ph.D. in Mathematics, UC Berkeley class of ‘71) and his wife, Yu-Yun Yau (Ph.D. in Physics, UC Berkeley class of ‘71), in honor of Prof. Yau’s Berkeley mathematical mentors, Shiing-Shen Chern, Shoshichi Kobayashi, and Charles Morrey. Distributions from the endowment will be used to support an annual lecturer in the fields of geometry and mathematical analysis in honor of three mathematicians, Shiing-Shen Chern, Shoshichi Kobayashi, and Charles Morrey. Each year the lecture will honor one of the three mathematicians, and the lecture will be variably known as the Charles Morrey Distinguished Lecture, the Shiing-Shen Chern Distinguished Lecture, or the Shoshichi Kobayashi Distinguished Lecture.
Biographical Information:
Professor Shing-Tung Yau, who received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1971, under the supervision of Professor Shiing-Shen Chern, is a member of NAS, AAAS, and a foreign academician of CAS, and has made significant contributions to differential geometry. In 1976, he proved the Calabi Conjecture. In 1979, Professor Yau and Professor Richard Schoen solved the Positive Mass Conjecture in General Relativity. Professor Yau currently serves as chair and professor at Tsinghua University, is the Director of Yau Mathematical Sciences Center and Qiuzhen College at Tsinghua University, and is the Dean of Beijing Yanqi Lake Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications. In 1982, he was awarded the Fields Medal for solving the Calabi Conjecture, as well as for making contributions to partial differential equations and to the positive mass conjecture of general relativity. He has continued to be recognized throughout his career via the Veblen Prize in Geometry, MacArthur Fellowship, Crafoord Prize, US National Medal of Science, Wolf Prize, Marcel Grossmann Award and Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. In 2024 he received the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Citation “for making bold and important mathematical discoveries, and supporting an international community of mathematicians and physicists.”
Professor Shiing-Shen Chern (1911-2004) is widely regarded as the greatest geometer of his generation. For more than six decades, he was a leader in the field of differential geometry and made significant contributions to such diverse areas as the geometry of fibre bundles, complex geometry, web geometry, integral geometry, Nevalinna theory, and the classical theory of submanifolds in euclidean space. Professor Chern completed his doctorate in 1936 in Hamburg. During his stay at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1943-1945, he did his ground-breaking work on characteristic classes and fibre bundles. When he returned to China in 1946, he set himself the task of introducing modern mathematics to China and succeeded in training a new generation of Chinese mathematicians. Professor Chern taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1960, when he came to Berkeley. He was a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He retired in 1979.
Professor Charles B. Morrey, Jr. (1907-1984) was a towering figure in twentieth-century analysis whose mathematical work fundamentally shaped the calculus of variations and the theory of elliptic partial differential equations. Educated at Ohio State University and Harvard University (PhD, 1931), Morrey joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1933, where he spent most of his career and became a central figure in building Berkeley into a leading center for analysis. He retired in 1973. Professor Morrey’s most enduring contributions concern regularity theory for solutions of variational problems and elliptic partial differential equations. He introduced what are now called “Morrey spaces”, function spaces that refined “Sobolev spaces” and became essential tools in modern analysis and PDE theory. His work established deep connections between weak solutions and smoothness, laying the groundwork for later developments in nonlinear elliptic equations and geometric measure theory. In 1966, Professor Morrey published his landmark monograph Multiple Integrals in the Calculus of Variations, which systematically organized decades of research and became a standard reference for generations of mathematicians. A dedicated teacher and mentor, his book University Calculus was the forerunner of the highly successful sequence of texts on calculus and analytic geometry written in collaboration with M.H. Protter. These books have had and continue to have a wide influence on both university and high school teaching of mathematics.
Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi (1932–2012) was a distinguished mathematician whose work profoundly influenced differential and complex geometry. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Tokyo in 1953, supplemented by intensive studies of French that led to a French government scholarship for graduate study in Paris and Strasbourg. In 1954, he moved to the United States and completed his PhD at the University of Washington in under two years, at the age of 24. After appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, and the University of British Columbia, he joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, becoming a full professor in 1966. He served twice as chair of Berkeley’s Department of Mathematics and retired in 1994. Professor Kobayashi is best known for introducing the “Kobayashi pseudometric”, a fundamental tool in complex geometry, and for developing the notion of Kobayashi hyperbolicity. He also formulated the influential “Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence”, asserting an equivalence between algebraic-geometric and differential-geometric properties of complex vector bundles. Over his career, he supervised 35 PhD students and authored seminal books, including Foundations of Differential Geometry (with Katsumi Nomizu), which educated generations of mathematicians. He received numerous honors, including Sloan, Guggenheim, Humboldt, and JSPS Fellowships, and was widely respected for his mentorship, clarity of exposition, and support of women in mathematics.