Frances Yao facts for kids

Frances Foong Chu Yao (Chinese: 儲楓; pinyin: Chǔ Fēng) is a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist from Taiwan and America. She is known for her amazing work in understanding how computers can solve problems more efficiently.

Currently, she is a top professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) of Tsinghua University in China. Before that, she was a leading professor and head of the computer science department at the City University of Hong Kong. She is now an honorary professor there.

Her Life and Work

Frances Yao got her first degree in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1969. After that, she continued her studies to get a Ph.D. (a very advanced degree) in 1973. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Michael J. Fischer.

After finishing her Ph.D., she worked at several famous universities. These included the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Brown University, and Stanford University. In 1979, she joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. This was a well-known research lab where she worked until 1999.

In 2003, Frances Yao came out of retirement. She became the head and a top professor of the Computer Science Department at City University of Hong Kong. She held this important role until June 2011.

She is a respected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1991, she and Ronald Graham won the Lester R. Ford Award. This award is given for excellent writing that explains complex math topics clearly. Their winning article was called A Whirlwind Tour of Computational Geometry.

Frances Yao's husband, Andrew Yao, is also a very famous theoretical computer scientist. He even won the Turing Award, which is like the Nobel Prize for computing.

Much of Frances Yao's research has been in computational geometry. This field looks at how to solve problems using shapes and spaces with computers. She also worked on combinatorial algorithms, which are special step-by-step instructions for computers.

She is famous for her work with Mike Paterson on something called binary space partitioning. This helps computers organize space efficiently. She also worked with Dan Greene on how computers handle shapes with limited detail. With Alan Demers and Scott Shenker, she studied scheduling algorithms. These algorithms help computers manage power to save energy.

More recently, she has been working in cryptography. This is the science of secure communication, like making secret codes. Along with her husband Andrew Yao and Wang Xiaoyun, she helped find new ways to break the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function. This work helps make computer security better.