Shiu-Yuen Cheng

Shiu-Yuen Cheng (鄭紹遠) is a Hong Kong mathematician. He is currently the Chair Professor of Mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Cheng received his Ph.D. in 1974, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern, from University of California at Berkeley.^[1] Cheng then spent some years as a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Then he became a full professor at University of California at Los Angeles. Cheng chaired the Mathematics departments of both the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in the 1990s. In 2004, he became the Dean of Science at HKUST. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[2]

He is well known for contributions to differential geometry and partial differential equations, including Cheng's eigenvalue comparison theorem, Cheng's maximal diameter theorem, and a number of works with Shing-Tung Yau. Many of Cheng and Yau's works formed part of the corpus of work for which Yau was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982. As of 2020, Cheng's most recent research work was published in 1996.