Audrey Tang

Early life

Tang was born in Taipei. Her father, Tang Kuang-hua, and mother, Lee Ya-ching, were both writers at the China Times. When she was four, she was diagnosed with a heart condition that had a 50% survival rate. Lee Ya-ching helped develop Taiwan's first consumer co-operative, and co-developed an experimental primary school employing indigenous teachers. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight. Initially, she coded in pencil and paper because she didn't have a computer. She began to learn Perl at age 12. Tang spent part of her childhood in Germany. Two years later, she dropped out of junior high school, unable to adapt to student life. Tang's head teacher encouraged her to go to university and later do research at Harvard, but Tang didn't see the point as she was already informally working with researchers from Harvard and Stanford. By the year 2000, at the age of 19, Tang had already held positions in software companies, and worked in California's Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur.