Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (姚期智) (born December 24, 1946) is a prominent computer scientist.

He received the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, in 2000, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity".

Yao was born in Shanghai, China. He completed his undergraduate education in physics at the National Taiwan University, before completing a PhD in physics at Harvard University in 1972, and then a second PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois.

He had been a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he continues to work on algorithms and complexity. In 2004, he became a Professor of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.