150W: Bin Yu’s “most successful failure”

EECS Prof. Bin Yu is the subject of a 150W profile by the Department of Statistics, where she holds a joint appointment. Yu found refuge from the tumult of Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution in the orderly tables of a math textbook.  Although she placed first in the math section of the graduate school entrance exam, she failed to be accepted as a pupil by the professor she hoped to work with at Peking University because she was a woman.  As a result of this difficult rejection, she switched to studying probability and statistics, where a new world of new opportunities opened to her.  The profile covers Bin Yu’s journey from her childhood in China to her days as a graduate student at UC Berkeley,  a career in both academia and industry on the east coast, her return to Berkeley as a professor, and her important contributions to the field of data science.  150W is the year-long celebration of 150 years of women at UC Berkeley.