Career
After receiving his Doctor of Philosophy from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1991 under the direction of Ronald G. Douglas, Yu has held positions at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (1991-1992), University of Colorado at Boulder (1992-2000), Vanderbilt University (2000-2012), and various visiting positions at prestigious institutions worldwide. He currently holds the Powell Chair in Mathematics at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University and is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Yu"s research interests include noncommutative geometry, higher index theory of elliptic operators, K-theory, and geometric group theory.
He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the Novikov conjecture on homotopy invariants of higher signatures, the Baum-Connes conjecture on K-theory of group C*-algebras, and the stable Borel conjecture on rigidity of manifolds.
In his work on the Novikov conjecture, he developed controlled operator K-theory. In the mathematical literature, several concepts are named after him such as Yu"s property A, and Yu"s localization algebra.
Yu has delivered invited addresses at the American Mathematical Society meeting in 1999, and at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006. He was a plenary speaker at the Topology Festival in 2002 and the Geometry Festival in 2007.
He is an editor of Journal of Noncommutative Geometry, Annals of K-Theory, Journal of Topology and Analysis, and Kyoto Journal of Mathematics.
