The 2024 S.-T. Yau High School Science Award concluded on December 8th at Tsinghua University. A total of 61 awards were decided among 81 teams of high school students from home and abroad, covering 6 basic subjects: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and economic and financial modeling. Liu Guangyu, from the Experimental High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University and the winner of the Biology Gold Award, clinched the highly anticipated interdisciplinary top award - the Grand Prize. Additionally, teams from five high schools, including Beijing 101 Middle School and Nanjing Foreign Language School won the gold medals in each discipline.
Shing-Tung Yau (left) and Xiang Botao (right) presented the Grand Prize to Liu Guangyu.
Xiang Botao, Executive Deputy Secretary of the CPC Tsinghua University Committee, Professor Shing-Tung Yau, Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, and Professor Vladimir Markovic, Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor at Tsinghua University, attended the award ceremony.
At the award ceremony, Xiang Botao stated that the Award has always prioritized encouraging students' innovation, continuously exploring the selection and cultivation mechanism for basic and frontier talents, and building a broad platform to help teenagers in pursuing their scientific research dreams. It serves not only as a preemptive move in the university's talent cultivation work but also injects vitality into China's basic education. He hopes that young students will bravely shoulder the mission of strengthening the country through science and technology, always pursue first-class research topics, lead the future, serve the country, and contribute to the world with scientific and technological innovation.
Shing-Tung Yau emphasized that the competition highlights creativity, depth of research, and the ability of students to present. He was delighted to see the excellent performance of these young people. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the goal of building a technological powerhouse by 2035. The key to achieving this goal lies in cultivating a large number of creative and courageous young people. In recent years, a series of explorations, such as the establishment of Qiuzhen College, the authorization to establish the Shing-Tung Yau Youth Class, and the launch of the pioneering class of mathematics for outstanding youth project, all aim to cultivate future leading scientists, making them the backbone of Chinese science and contributing to the construction of a technology powerhouse.
The award ceremony
The finals invited over 40 well-known domestic and foreign leading scientists as judges, including Academicians Ngaiming Mok, Henry N.C. Wong, and Hu Shimin from the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Tuan-hua David Ho, Member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan; Yuan Junying, Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences; Hirosi Ooguri, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Martin Banwell, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences; Bai Chong-En, Senior Professor of Liberal Arts at Tsinghua University; and Motoko Kotani, Executive Vice President of Tohoku University in Japan. Professor Shing-Tung Yau also participated in the evaluation as the overall chair of the award.
Motoko Kotani, Bai Chong-En, and Hirosi Ooguri (from left to right) respectively delivered reports
At the 2024 S.-T. Yau Science Forum held on the same day, Motoko Kotani, Bai Chong-En, and Hirosi Ooguri respectively delivered reports on Discrete geometric analysis and its application to materials science, Mechanism Design: How Best to Induce People to Do What You Want Them to, and The Science of “The Man from the 9 Dimensions.” The venue also specially screened the popular science film "The Man from the 9 Dimensions," for which Hirosi Ooguri served as the scientific consultant.
the 2024 S.-T. Yau Science Forum
The 2024 S.-T. Yau High School Science Award kicked off its registration in April this year, with a competition schedule spanning eight months. A total of 2,813 teams signed up, covering over 700 high schools at home and abroad, and 1,279 valid papers were submitted. From October to November, the preliminary selection, letter evaluation, desk evaluation, and semifinal interview were carried out during the regional evaluation process. Eventually, 86 teams qualified for the finals, with 81 teams and over 200 teachers and students competing in the global finals. In the final stage, the format consists of university dissertation interviews and defense, where participants engage in face-to-face communication with international judges. Both the interview and defense are conducted in English.
Editor：Li Han
