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Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and top mathematics award winner Ngo Bao Chau (right). — VNS Photo Duc Tam |
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung congratulated Chau, whom he said was the nation's pride. He said the professor had brought great honour to the country as he was only the second Asian and the first from a developing country to win the highest honour in mathematics. The prize, which was introduced in 1936, has also been won by a Japanese academic.
Besides praising Vietnamese education, which he said had laid a solid foundation for Chau work, Dung expressed his thanks to the educational systems in France, the US and other developed countries, which have enabled Chau's talent to flourish.
Dung called on students nation-wide to follow Chau's example.
Ha Khuong Duy, a student at Ha Noi National University's College of Science, who won a gold medal at the 50th International Mathematics Olympiad in 2009, said Chau's success would be a great source of inspiration to young people to strive to reach the very top of their chosen academic discipline.
Chau said the fact that a Vietnamese academic had won a Fields Medal would pave the way for a remarkable change in the quality of mathematical research in Viet Nam.
Chau expressed his sincere thanks for the contribution made by his former teachers in Viet Nam, France and the US, adding that a sound working environment that allowed academic freedom was one of the main factors governing effective scientific research.
Top award
On August 19, Chau was awarded the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize, the prestigious Fields Medal, at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2010 in India "for his proof of the Fundamental Lemma in the theory of automorphic forms through the introduction of new algebro-geometric methods".
In 2004, Chau, as a professor at Universite' de Paris-Sud and his PhD supervisor Gerard Laumon proved the Fundamental Lemma for a family of groups, which earned them a Clay prize, another prestigious award, in the same year. In 2008, after years working on his own, Chau finally established the theory of Fundamental Lemma in general, which Time Magazine praised as one of the 10 most outstanding scientific discoveries of 2009.
The congress' organising committee lauded Chau's brilliant work and said it would lead to many striking advances in the Langlands' programme, which is like a grand unification of different branches of mathematics, including number theory, spectral theory and algebraic geometry. — VNS
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