He obtained his BA at Princeton (summa cum laude, Shenstone Prize and Kusaka Prize), MA at Cambridge (Distinction, Tripos), and PhD at MIT. After a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined Oxford as the FitzJames Fellow and an STFC Advanced Fellow. He works at the interface of string theory, algebraic and combinatorial geometry, and machine learning.
Recently, he helped introduce machine-learning into the field of pure mathematics by using AI to help uncover new patterns and raise new conjectures (cf. interview by Science [Vol 365, July, 2019] and by New Scientist [Dec 9 Issue, 2019]).
Outside of research, Yang plays the violin (Princeton orchestra; founding member of the Saville Consort) and is a tenor who sang for the chapel choirs of St. Catherine’s, Cambridge and Merton, Oxford.
Prof Anna Baldycheva is also a co-founder of a number of successful start-ups in different technological and business sectors. She has over 100 scientific publications, plenary and invited talks to date. She is a Fellow of the Royal Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of Royal Microscopical Society. Prof Baldycheva is an editor of the Nature Scientific Reports and Nanoscale Research Letters journals and is an executive chair of the Royal Microscopical Society Engineering Section. She is also an expert in Emerging Technologies in the European Commission.