Andrew Yao

Who is Andrew Yao?

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a Taiwanese American computer scientist and computational theorist. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's Principle.

Yao was born in Shanghai, China. He completed his undergraduate education in physics at the National Taiwan University, before completing a Doctor of Philosophy in physics at Harvard University in 1972, and then a second PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975.

In 1996 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. He received the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, in 2000, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity".

From 1982 to 1986, he was a full professor at Stanford University. From 1986 to 2004, he was the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, where he continued to work on algorithms and complexity.