Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022 he was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.

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 honours the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.