Frances Yao

Frances Foong Chu Yao is a Chinese mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, born Chu Foong in Shanghai. She studied mathematics at National Taiwan University, graduating in 1969, and earned her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 under Michael J. Fischer with a dissertation on lower bounds for selection problems. After posts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Brown University and Stanford University she joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 and stayed until 1999. In 2003 she returned to become Head and Chair Professor of computer science at City University of Hong Kong, a post she held until June 2011, and she is now a Chair Professor at Tsinghua University. Her research covers computational geometry and combinatorial algorithms, including binary space partitioning with Mike Paterson and energy-efficient scheduling with Alan Demers and Scott Shenker, and more recently cryptography, including attacks on SHA-1. In 1991 she and Ronald Graham won the Lester R. Ford Award.