Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese and French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad.
Background
Chau was born in 1972, the only son of an intellectual family in Hanoi, North Vietnam. His father, professor Ngô Huy Cẩn, is full professor of physics at the Vietnam National Institute of Mechanics. His mother, Trần Lưu Vân Hiền, is a physician and associate professor at an herbal medicine hospital in Hanoi.
Education
École Normale Supérieure.
Career
At age 15, he entered the mathematics specialization class at High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi University of Science (Khối chuyên Tổng Hợp – Đại học Khoa Học Tự Nhiên Hà Nội), formerly known as A0-class. After visiting Chau"s father, Paul Germain, secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, arranged for Chau to study in France. He was offered a scholarship by the French government for undergraduate study at the Paris VI University but he chose the prestigious École Normale Supérieure.
He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in 1997 from the Universite Paris-Sud under the supervision of Gérard Laumon.
He became Professor at Paris-Sud 11 University in 2005. In 2005, at age 33, Chau received the title of professor in Vietnam, becoming the country"s youngest-ever professor
Since 2007, Chau has worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey as well as the Hanoi Institute of Mathematics. He joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Chicago on September 1, 2010.
Moreover, since 2011 he is acting as scientific director of the newly founded Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study.
He holds both Vietnamese and French citizenship.
Politics
After high school, Chau expected to study in Budapest, but in the aftermath of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the new Hungarian government halted scholarships to students from Vietnam.
Views
He became a member of National Center for Scientific Research at Paris 13 University from 1998 to 2005, and defended his habilitation degree there in 2003.
Membership
American Mathematical Society. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.