His appointment was announced by the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) on March 9.

The Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics is to become a prestigious maths centre in order to improve scientific capacity of maths researchers and lecturers in Vietnam.

The Hanoi-based institute is put under the management of MoET. It operates under a special mechanism approved by the Government to encourage overseas Vietnamese scientists to join the institute for the sake of Vietnam’s mathematics development.

Last year, Chau was awarded the Field Medal, the world’s top mathematics prize, for his proof of the Fundamental Lemma in the theory of automorphic forms, by introducing new algebro-geometric methods.

The award, comparable to the Nobel prize for mathematics, is a great honor for Vietnam , making it the second nation in Asia after Japan to have citizen awarded the medal.

In 2009, his evidence proving the Langlands fundamental lemma was selected by Time Magazine as one of the 10 most outstanding scientific discoveries of 2009.

(Source: SGGP)