Maya Ying Lin (born 1959) was an American architect whose two most important works in the 1980s were the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

Maya Ying Lin was born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, a manufacturing and agricultural town 75 miles southeast of Columbus. Athens is also the home of Ohio University, where both Lin's mother, a poet, and her late father, a ceramicist, taught. The couple fled China just before the Communist Revolution of 1949, leaving behind a prominent family which had included a well-known lawyer and, perhaps significantly, an architect. Lin's family in America includes her mother and an older brother, Tan, who, like his mother, is a poet.

During her childhood Maya Lin found it easy to keep herself entertained, whether by reading or by building miniature towns. From an early age she excelled in mathematics, which led her...