Jin-Yi Cai

Jin-Yi Cai (; born 1961) is a Chinese American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science, and also the Steenbock Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research is in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity theory. In recent years he has concentrated on the classification of computational counting problems, especially counting graph homomorphisms, counting constraint satisfaction problems, and Holant problems as related to holographic algorithms.

Early life Cai was born in Shanghai, China. He studied mathematics at Fudan University, graduating in 1981. He earned a master's degree at Temple University in 1983, a second master's degree at Cornell University in 1985,

Academic career He became a faculty member at Yale University (1986-1989), Princeton University (1989-1993), and SUNY Buffalo (1993-2000), rising from Assistant Professor to Full Professor in 1996. He became a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2000.

Awards Cai was a Presidential Young Investigator, Sloan Research Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He received a Morningside Silver Medal, and a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists. He was also awarded the Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics awarded by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society.

He was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2001), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), and a foreign member of Academia Europaea (2017).