Mu-Tao Wang () is a Taiwanese mathematician and current Professor of Mathematics at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

Education

He entered

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 d ...

in 1984, originally for international business, but after a year he switched to mathematics. He earned his BS in Mathematics at National Taiwan University in 1988 and his MS from the same institution in 1992. He received a PhD in Mathematics in 1998 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

with a thesis entitled ''"Generalized harmonic maps and representations of discrete groups."'' His thesis adviser at Harvard was Chinese

Fields Medal The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award ho ...

ist and

differential geometer Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilin ...

Shing-Tung Yau Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathem ...

Career

Wang joined the Columbia faculty as an assistant professor in 2001, and was appointed full professor in 2009. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Wang was Szego Assistant Professor at

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 consider ...

. He was a

Sloan Research Fellow The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

from 2003–2005. In 2007, he was named a Kavli Fellow of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

and was awarded the

Chern Prize The Chern Medal is an international award recognizing outstanding lifelong achievement of the highest level in the field of mathematics. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which is held every four years. In ...

. Wang is a Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

and won the

Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics The Morningside Medal of Mathematics () is awarded to exceptional mathematicians of Chinese descent under the age of forty-five for their seminal achievements in mathematics and applied mathematics. The winners of the Morningside Medal of Mathematic ...

in 2010. In 2010, Wang delivered the plenary address at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, and was plenary speaker at the

International Congress on Mathematical Physics The International Congress on Mathematical Physics (ICMP) is the largest research congress in mathematical physics. It is held every three years, on behalf of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP). Prizes The Henri Poi ...

. In addition, he was also plenary speaker at the International Conference on Differential Geometry in 2011. After winning the Morningside Medal, Wang told interviewers that he did not consider himself a particularly good student and did not consistently make good grades. He struggled with studying topics which did not interest him just for the grade, but spends a lot of time on subjects which interested him. He credits his career in mathematics to two people: his mother and his thesis adviser Shing-Tung Yau. He cites his mother's support and understanding of his decision to switch to mathematics in university despite it being a much less lucrative field, and describes meeting Yau in 1992 as the pivotal point in his life when he decided to make mathematics research his primary focus.

Work

Wang's research is focused in the fields of

differential geometry Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multili ...

and

mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and t ...

, specifically

general relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...

. He has studied higher co-dimensional

mean curvature flow In the field of differential geometry in mathematics, mean curvature flow is an example of a geometric flow of hypersurfaces in a Riemannian manifold (for example, smooth surfaces in 3-dimensional Euclidean space). Intuitively, a family of surf ...

extensively, leading to criteria relating to the flow's existence, regularity, and convergence. In the field of general relativity, he is especially known for his work on quasilocal mass-energy; the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass is named in his honor.

Selected bibliography

*"A fixed point theorem of isometry action on Riemannian manifolds", Journal of Differential Geometry 50 (1998), no. 2, 249-267 *"Mean curvature flow of surfaces in Einstein four-manifolds", Journal of Differential Geometry 57 (2001), no. 2, 301-338 *"Long-time existence and convergence of graphic mean curvature flow in arbitrary codimension", Inventiones Mathematicae 148 (2002), no. 3, 525-543 *(with Knut Smoczyk) "Mean curvature flows of Lagrangian submanifolds with convex potentials", Journal of Differential Geometry 62 (2002), no. 2, 243-257 *"The Dirichlet problem for the minimal surface system in arbitrary codimension", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 57 (2004), no. 2, 267-281 *(with

) "Isometric embeddings into the Minkowski space and new quasi-local mass", Communications in Mathematical Physics 288 (2009), no. 3, 919-942 *(with Ivana Medoš) "Deforming symplectomorphisms of complex projective spaces by the mean curvature flow", Journal of Differential Geometry 87 (2011), no. 2, 309-342 *(with

Simon Brendle Simon Brendle (born June 1981) is a German mathematician working in differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations. He received his Dr. rer. nat. from Tübingen University under the supervision of Gerhard Huisken (2001). He ...

and Pei-Ken Hung) "A Minkowski type inequality for hypersurfaces in the Anti-de Sitter-Schwarzschild manifold", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics *(with Po-Ning Chen and

) "Quasilocal angular momentum and center of mass in general relativity", arXiv:1312.0990

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wang, Mu-Tao Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Columbia University faculty Differential geometers Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Mathematical physicists National Taiwan University alumni 20th-century Taiwanese mathematicians 21st-century Taiwanese mathematicians