Ngô Bảo Châu, Fields Medal 2010

Ngô Bảo Châu (born June 28, 1972) is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad. He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.

Career

Châu became a 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, Châu 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. In addition, since 2011 he has been Scientific Director of the newly founded Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM). In 2016 Châu was Co-General Chair of Asiacrypt the first time that the Asian cryptography conference was held in Vietnam.

Work

Châu first came to prominence by proving, in joint work with Gérard Laumon, the fundamental lemma for unitary groups. Their general strategy was to understand the local orbital integrals appearing in the fundamental lemma in terms of affine Springer fibers arising in the Hitchin fibration. This allowed them to employ the tools of geometric representation theory, namely the theory of perverse sheaves, to study what was initially a combinatorial problem of a number-theoretic nature. Chau eventually succeeded in formulating the proof for the fundamental lemma for Lie algebras in 2008. Together with results from Jean-Loup Waldspurger, who had earlier deduced stronger forms of the fundamental lemma from this result, this completed the proof of the fundamental lemma in all cases. As a result, Châu was awarded a Fields Medal in 2010.

Ngo Bao Chau was the co-author of the Vietnamese children book "Ai and Ky in the land of the invisible numbers".

Awards

• Clay Research Award (2004)
• Oberwolfach Prize (2007)
• Sophie Germain Prize (2007)
• Fields Medal (2010)
• Legion of Honour (2011)