Frances Foong Chu Yao () is a Chinese-born American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist. She is currently a Chair Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) of Tsinghua University. She was Chair Professor and Head of the Department of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at the

City University of Hong Kong City University of Hong Kong (CityU) is a world-class public research university located in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. It was founded in 1984 as City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and became a fully accredited university in 1994. Currently, CityU i ...

, where she is now an honorary professor.

Life

After receiving a B.S. in mathematics from

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 during Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imperial University and served ...

in 1969, Yao did her Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Michael J. Fischer at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

, receiving her Ph.D. in 1973. She then held positions at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universi ...

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Provide ...

, and

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

, before joining the staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 where she stayed until her retirement in 1999. In 2003, she came out of retirement to become the Head and a Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong, which she held until June 2011. She is a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher educatio ...

of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respon ...

; in 1991, she and

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for their expository article, ''A Whirlwind Tour of Computational Geometry''. Yao's husband,

Andrew Yao Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (; born December 24, 1946) is a Chinese computer scientist and computational theorist. He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Yao use ...

, is also a well-known theoretical computer scientist and

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...

winner. Much of Yao's research has been in the subject of

computational geometry Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems a ...

and combinatorial algorithms; she is known for her work with

Mike Paterson Michael Stewart Paterson, is a British computer scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) at the University of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the department of computer science in 2005 ...

binary space partitioning In computer science, binary space partitioning (BSP) is a method for space partitioning which recursively subdivides a Euclidean space into two convex sets by using hyperplanes as partitions. This process of subdividing gives rise to a represe ...

, her work with Dan Greene on finite-resolution computational geometry, and her work with Alan Demers and Scott Shenker on

scheduling algorithm In computing, scheduling is the action of assigning ''resources'' to perform ''tasks''. The ''resources'' may be processors, network links or expansion cards. The ''tasks'' may be threads, processes or data flows. The scheduling activity is ...

s for energy-efficient power management. More recently she has been working in

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

. Along with her husband Andrew Yao and Wang Xiaoyun, they found new attacks on the

SHA-1 In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographically broken but still widely used hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecim ...

cryptographic hash function..

Selected publications

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References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Yao, Frances Foong 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century Chinese mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century Chinese mathematicians American computer scientists Brown University faculty Chinese emigrants to the United States Chinese women computer scientists City University of Hong Kong faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Living people Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni National Taiwan University alumni Researchers in geometric algorithms Scientists at PARC (company) Stanford University Department of Computer Science faculty Tsinghua University faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Year of birth missing (living people)