The Shape of a Life: One Mathematician's Search for the Universe's Hidden Geometry

Harvard mathematician, Fields Prize winner Yau Xingtong gave a geometric justification for the "first string revolution", proposed fundamentally new ideas in understanding mass and curvature, and theoretically proved the stability of our Universe. In his autobiographical book, Yau talks about the incredible path that led him to the mathematical Olympus. Poor childhood in China and Hong Kong, graduate school at Berkeley in the midst of the Vietnam War protests, proof of the Calabi conjecture for which he was awarded the Fields Medal, work on two continents - China and America, the development of a new area of u200bu200bmath - geometric analysis . Yau created this new area together with friends and colleagues, paving the way for solving several important and very difficult problems that have confronted science for decades and even hundreds of years. What is their essence - there is a chance to understand by reading the book. After all, the goal of the authors is not only to tell about the life of a gifted mathematician and the academic environment, but also to bring the reader closer to understanding the current concepts and problems of mathematics and theoretical physics.