Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
姚期智
	Yao in 2015
Born	December 24, 1946; Shanghai, China
Citizenship	Republic of China (1946–2015); United States (?–2015); People's Republic of China (2015–present);
Education	National Taiwan University (BS); Harvard University (MA, PhD); University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (PhD)
Known for	Yao's principle; Communication complexity; Dolev–Yao model; Garbled circuit; Hybrid argument; Yao's Millionaires' Problem; Yao's test; Yao graph
Spouse	Frances Yao
Awards	George Pólya Prize (1987); Knuth Prize (1996); Turing Award (2000); Kyoto Prize (2021)
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer science; Theoretical physics
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; Tsinghua University; Chinese University of Hong Kong
Theses	Internal Symmetries and Positivity (1969, Harvard); A Study of Concrete Computational Complexity (1975, Illinois);
Doctoral advisor	Sheldon Glashow (Harvard); Chung Laung Liu (Illinois)
Notable students	William A. Dembski
Chinese name
Chinese	姚期智
Hanyu Pinyin
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	Yáo Qīzhì
Wade–Giles	Yao2 Ch'i1chih4

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Chinese: 姚期智; pinyin: Yáo Qīzhì; born December 24, 1946) is a Chinese computer scientist, theoretical physicist, and computational theorist. He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's principle.

After graduating from National Taiwan University, Yao earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1972 and a second doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1975 before teaching mathematics and computer science as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1986, he became the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. He won the 2000 ACM Turing Award.

Yao was a naturalized U.S. citizen, and worked for many years in the U.S. In 2015, together with Yang Chen-Ning, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.