By Diana Steele
The Shape of a Life
Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis
Yale Univ., $28
One of the first remarkable things that mathematician Shing-Tung Yau reveals in his memoir, The Shape of a Life, is that his name was not originally Yau. His family fled China to British-ruled Hong Kong in 1949 when he was an infant, and the name Yau came from a mistranslation on a registration form when he entered elementary school. No one in the family spoke English, so to fill out paperwork, they relied on an English-speaking teacher, who incorrectly translated his family name of “Chiu” to Yau.