Shou-Wu Zhang (Chinese: 张寿武; pinyin: Zhāng Shòuwǔ; born October 9, 1962) is a Chinese-American mathematician known for his work in number theory and arithmetic geometry.
[1] He spent most of his childhood raising ducks in the countryside and self-studying mathematics textbooks that he acquired from sent-down youth in trades for frogs.
[5][1][2][3][4][6] He then studied under analytic number theorist Wang Yuan at the Chinese Academy of Sciences where he received his master's degree in 1986.
[1][2] He initially studied under Goldfeld and then Hervé Jacquet,[5] before deciding to work with Lucien Szpiro, a visiting professor at Columbia at the time, and Gerd Faltings at Princeton University.
[5] In particular, the result led him to a proof of the rank one Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for modular abelian varieties of GL(2) type over totally real fields through his work relating the Néron–Tate height of Heegner points to special values of L-functions in (Zhang 1997, 2001).