Ngô Bảo Châu

Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician, born in Hanoi in 1972, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms in the Langlands Program (2009) - a result named one of Time magazine's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2009. He won two IMO gold medals representing Vietnam (1988 with a perfect 42/42 score, and 1989), the first Vietnamese student to do so. In 2010 he became the first Vietnamese mathematician awarded the Fields Medal. He was Francis and Rose Yuen Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and chaired its Department of Mathematics from July 2023; in February 2026 HKU announced he would join its Department of Mathematics as a chair professor from June 2026.

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• Announced 5 Feb 2026 that he leaves the US to join HKU's Department of Mathematics as a chair professor from June 2026 - returning to Asia after 15 years at UChicago.Feb 9, 2026
• First Vietnamese national to win the Fields Medal (2010), awarded for the fundamental lemma work; the Fields Medal is limited to mathematicians under 40, making this his only possible window.Aug 2010
• Proved the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms in 2009, solving a problem open ~30 years since Langlands proposed it; Time magazine ranked it a Top 10 Scientific Discovery of 2009.2009
• Won IMO gold in 1988 at age 16 with a perfect 42/42 (rank 1) and again in 1989 (40 pts, rank 17) for Vietnam - the first Vietnamese student with two IMO golds and still the benchmark for Vietnamese maths.Jul 1989
• Joined University of Chicago mathematics faculty 1 September 2010, immediately after the Fields Medal, and chaired its Department of Mathematics from July 2023 before leaving for Hong Kong.Jul 1, 2023
• Founding Scientific Director of the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) since 2011, the main vehicle by which he has built Vietnamese research capacity rather than only his own career.2011
• Expected to study in Budapest, but Hungary halted scholarships to Vietnamese students after the fall of Communism; Paul Germain of the French Academy of Sciences intervened, routing him to France - the pivot that made his European career possible.1990
• Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and Foreign Member of the French Academy of Sciences (2016), on top of the Fields Medal - recognition across both his adopted academies.2016
• Became a full professor in Vietnam in 2005 at age 33 - the country's youngest-ever professor - while already a professor at Paris-Sud 11, showing a dual France/Vietnam academic identity he kept in parallel.2005
• His first major result was joint work with his PhD advisor Gérard Laumon on the fundamental lemma for unitary groups - a rare case where the student-advisor pair progressed the same problem together before Châu solved the general case alone.2004
• Born 28 June 1972 in Hanoi, son of physics professor Ngô Huy Cẩn (Vietnam National Institute of Mechanics) and physician Trần Lưu Vân Hiền - an academic household that put him in gifted-maths tracks from primary school.Jun 28, 1972
• Serves as Francis and Rose Yuen Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; office Eckhart 303, office phone [private detail omitted], email [contact omitted], page http://math.uchicago.edu/~ngo/.