The Shape of a Life by SHING-TUNG YAU and STEVE NADIS

“LEARNING IS BUT a peep into the vast unknown, like dipping a cup into a boundless ocean.”

These words, written by Shing-Tung Yau in 2005, are a fitting close to his new autobiography, The Shape of a Life.

Yau begins with his family’s flight from Maoist China shortly after his birth in 1949 and takes the reader through his impoverished childhood in Hong Kong, the loss of his father at age 14, and his remarkable career and life in mathematics, including his breakthroughs in geometry and string theory.

Yau, now a Harvard professor, received his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley at age 22, published a proof of the Calabi conjecture at age 27, and won the Fields Medal – known as the Nobel Prize for mathematics – for it in 1984. He has been, to hear him tell it, at the centre of the international mathematics community for nearly 40 years, and he comes across as a truly unique thinker.

But in the preface, Yau notes, “We build upon history and are shaped by myriad interactions. These interactions can, on occasion, lead to misunderstandings and even fights, which I have, unfortunately, been caught up in from time to time.” This is a tantalising taste of what will certainly be the most controversial chapter of the book – the penultimate chapter, in which he discusses Grigory Perelman’s proof of Poincaré conjecture and the subsequent, and very public,

debate over its comprehensiveness and credit.

For those who read The New Yorker’s 2006 article Manifold Destiny, this will be a fascinating look at Yau’s side of the story. (He contemplated but ultimately declined to file a libel lawsuit against the magazine at the time.) For those who have not read it, I guarantee that after reading his account, you will.

Yau, with the help of co-author Steve Nadis, a science writer, is a sympathetic and at times disarming narrator. The writing of his first paper – which became his doctoral dissertation – is the story of a 21-year-old Chinese man alone over the Christmas holidays in California with nothing but the Berkeley mathematics library to keep him company. Later, the MacArthur Fellowshipwinner says he doesn’t understand what the word genius means.

It’s possible he also doesn’t understand what politics means. Professing not to practise any, Yau has nonetheless found himself at the forefront of the Chinese and American mathematics communities: an emperor to some, a villain to others.

The shape of a life might be all in how you look at it. Yau’s clear-eyed and straightforward account offers a compelling view into the shape of his own fascinating journey – whether that’s the full story, is up to the reader to decide.