Code Legends | CAS Academician, Turing Award, the only Chinese-American winner: Andrew Yao

Code Legends

Andrew Yao

Turing Award winner Andrew Yao: 57-year-old resolutely returned to sell in the United States property

Academician of CAs, dean of Interdisciplinary information Research Institute of Tsinghua University, is a world-renowned computer scientist, the first award-winning Asian scholar since the founding of the Turing Award, the only Chinese computer scientists to date, is also one of the founders of the Modern Cryptography foundation of the world. 13 years ago, he decided to abandon the American elite's tenure, return to the Motherland, pour all his energies, for China to create a world-class computer science, training top-notch innovative talent.

In 1967, Andrew Yao went to Harvard University to start his own physical world exploration with the 1979 Nobel laureate in physics, mentor Glashow, and took a PhD in physics in 1972. 1973 years, at the age of 26, Yao has made an important decision in his life: Give up the physics of painstaking research for many years, and turn to the ascendant computer technology.

"In terms of ability and character, I am more suitable for computer." Physics values intuition, you have to infer the correct answer to the problem, the verification may not be strict, but the math, including the computer, the most important thing is that you must use rigorous mathematics to prove the answer. I find that my reasoning ability is more appropriate in the computer field. "In 1973, Andrew Yao entered a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois, known for its deep accumulation of computer science. Two years later, he got his wish.

Talking about the position of Andrew Yao in academia, across the computer and physics majors, the industry people do not admire. With a world-class breakthrough in the method of encrypting shared data, Yao was awarded the Holy Grail of Computing in 2000, the only award-winning Chinese in the 52 History of the award.

"Yao Class" Ten years:

an elite education show

"Tsinghua has a lot of good students. There are some typical Chinese students, each of which strives for the first, but there are some students who want to do what they are really interested in at the university. I hope that the Tsinghua environment will not be so much pressure, but can feel the learning, research process of the challenges and breakthroughs, and the resulting sense of well-being. only in this way can we cultivate the world's top young people , whether they are in the future to be academic or to start a business. ”

Yao's "Theoretical Computer Science" is a professional basic course for the first year of undergraduate. Every year, he will be very careful to comb the teaching ideas, each section is carefully planned. He talked about this course for 8 years, until he found the right young teacher to pass the baton down. In the meantime he also served as a teacher of "Getting Started", "Computer Application Mathematics", "Quantum information" and many other subjects. Most of the "Yao class" students have listened to Andrew Yao's class in the lower grades and have changed their way of life in a short period of one or two semesters.

Many people believe that compared with world-class universities, China's gap is mainly in doctoral education; in other words, undergraduate education in China is also first-class. When Andrew Yao first arrived at Tsinghua University, he was planning to build a good mechanism for doctoral students. Then he changed his plan and initiated the idea that elite education should be picked up by undergraduates.

Yao believes that in the field of computer science, China attaches great importance to the study of computer engineering, to truly breakthrough, to be able to compete with the world-class undergraduate education, not only need internationalization, but also challenging. Andrew Yao from the root of the idea of solving problems, the Tsinghua University School's strong support.

how much of an ox is Yao. Count his academic attainments in three major fields.

Andrew Yao is teaching and research at the world's top universities, including MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley. His main contributions include three major areas, and can be broadly divided into three major stages:

The first stage: The Innovation of Algorithm theory

As early as the doctoral study, Yao put forward the stochastic algorithm complexity demonstration, but now has become the researcher no unknown important tool.

In the 1977 paper, Andrew Chi-Yao's Min-max principle, which became the basic technology of reasoning algorithm and complexity, has also been applied in the fields of attribute testing and learning theory.

In 1978, Andrew Yao made fundamental innovations in data structure innovation. In "Should tables be sorted", he introduced a data structure abstraction model called Cell-probe model, which has been widely used to create the lower bound of the algorithm.

at this stage, Yao's most important contribution is to put forward the important sub-areas of theoretical computer science: communication complexity and pseudo-random number generation calculation theory.

The second stage: Laying the foundation of cryptography

In 1982, Yao went back to Stanford University from the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley, where the focus shifted from the original algorithmic theory to cryptography, computer security, and random computing. And one of the most famous issues when it counts Yao's millionaire problem. This is exactly what the problem, and listen to Lei Feng network AI technology commentary.

In the Western Jin Dynasty, Shi Chong and Associates were proud to compete. Overwhelming associates's last straw, not "and poor and beautiful, to adorn his clothing", but he regarded as if the treasure of the two-foot coral tree was Shi Chong with iron Ruyi Crush, more crush is, Shi Chong also took out "a dry peerless" coral tree, let associates disconsolate self-loss.

Sack, only from a small coral tree, can be a glimpse of both sides family property depth. However, if the difficulty rises another level, even the coral tree also does not allow the local tyrants, how to dazzle the rich to be able to compete with the mark.

And in the 20th century after the millennium, Yao also made the famous "Yao's millionaire Problem" with the theme of "trench": how two millionaires compare their fortunes without revealing any information about their wealth.

This problem is also derived from the origin of the problem of security multi-party computing: In a non-new multi-user system, each user can complete the computing task through the network, but also can guarantee the security of their data.

Once the security multi-party computation problem has been put forward, it attracts many scholars to study, and later becomes one of the basic problems of cryptography protocol research, which has been widely used in solving many computational fields such as data mining, database querying and scientific calculation. And Yao's nature has become the foundation of modern cryptography. In 1982, Yao gave a solution: by generating random numbers, plus the public key and the encryption of the private key to compare, to avoid the order of the real domain and the reversibility of the addition and subtraction caused by the exposure of redundant information.

In addition to Yao's millionaire problem, Yao also made a pioneering contribution to encryption and security computing, "dolev-yao model" has become the most symbolic security work starting point, and "trap function theory and application" (Theory and applications of Trapdoor functions) and the Security Computing Protocol (protocols for secure computations) have also become important works in the field of secure computing. In addition, there are basic techniques in the field of Xor-lemma and solving the garbled circuit technology of safe multi-party computation, which is also proposed by Yao.

Phase III: The field of quantum computing

After the 1990s, at Princeton University William and Edna Macaleer Engineering and Applied Science, Yao began to work on quantum computing, communications and information theory. In the 1993 paper "Quantum circuit complexity", Andrew Yao extended the complexity of communication sealing to the field of quantum computing, and completed the theoretical foundation of quantum computer. In the field of line complexity, computational geometry, data structure and quantum computing, Professor Yao has put forward many open questions, and has opened up a lot of constructive creative ideas.

In 1995, Andrew Chi-Chi proposed a distributed quantum computing model, which later became the basis for the security of distributed quantum algorithms and quantum communication protocols.

With the fundamental contributions of Andrew Yao in computational theory, including the theory of complexity-based pseudo-random number generation, cryptography and communication complexity, the American Computer Association ACM awarded its Turing Award and Million dollar bonuses in 2000 in recognition of the tremendous contribution that Yao has made to the computer community.

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