Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, born December 24, 1946, is a Chinese computer scientist, theoretical physicist, and computational theorist. He currently serves as a professor and the dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Yao is best known for Yao's principle, a result derived from the minimax theorem that applies to computational complexity.

Yao earned a bachelor's degree in physics from National Taiwan University, followed by a physics doctorate from Harvard University in 1972 and a second doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1975. He then taught mathematics and computer science at MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. In 1986, he became the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. He received the 2000 ACM Turing Award.

Originally a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked in the United States for many years, Yao renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2015 alongside Yang Chen-Ning and became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Yao was born in Shanghai on December 24, 1946, when it was part of the Republic of China. His family moved first to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, where he was raised. After attending Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo High School, he graduated from National Taiwan University with a B.S. in physics in 1967. He then pursued graduate studies at Harvard, earning an M.A. in physics in 1969 and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1972, with a dissertation titled "Internal Symmetries and Positivity" supervised by Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow. In just two years, he completed a second Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1975, as a National Science Foundation fellow. That dissertation, "A Study of Concrete Computational Complexity," was supervised by Taiwanese computer scientist Chung Laung Liu.

His academic career included assistant professorships at MIT (1975–1976) and Stanford (1976–1981), a professorship at UC Berkeley (1981–1982), and a full professorship at Stanford (1982–1986). From 1986 to 2004, he held the William and Edna Macaleer Professorship at Princeton, focusing on algorithms and complexity. In 2004, he joined Tsinghua University as a professor at the Center for Advanced Study and director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science. Since 2010, he has been dean of the IIIS at Tsinghua, and he also initiated the Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) that year. He is additionally a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In May 2024, he co-authored an expert consensus paper with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and others, warning that AI safety research is lagging and outlining governance mechanisms for policymakers ahead of the AI Seoul Summit.

Yao received the Knuth Prize in 1996 and the Turing Award in 2000 for fundamental contributions to pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity. He also won the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology in 2021 and was listed on the Asian Scientist 100 in 2022. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery, as well as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His wife, Frances Yao, is also a theoretical computer scientist.