Ngo Bao Chau

Ngo Bao Chau, (born June 28, 1972, Hanoi, North Vietnam), Vietnamese-French mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 for his work in algebraic geometry, specifically “his proof of the Fundamental Lemma in the theory of automorphic forms.”

Chau received a scholarship from the French government in 1990 to study mathematics in France and spent two years at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. He then studied at the École Normale Supériere in Paris, and he received a doctorate from the University of Paris-South in 1997. From 1998 to 2004 he was a researcher in mathematics at the University of Paris-North. From 2005 to 2010 he was a professor at the University of Paris-South, and from 2007 to 2010 he held a concurrent appointment as a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey In 2010 he became a professor at the University of Chicago.

Chau was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India, in 2010 for his proof in 2008 of the Fundamental Lemma of the Langlands program. The Langlands program grew out of a 1967 letter that Canadian American mathematician Robert Langlands wrote to French mathematician André Weil, who was widely regarded as the leading number theorist of his generation. Langlands suggested a far-reaching generalization of what was already known concerning a deep connection between algebraic numbers and certain complex functions related to the classical Riemann zeta function. Hitherto, understanding had been limited to the cases where algebraic numbers are tied to the rational numbers by a commutative group (called a Galois group). Langlands proposed a way of dealing with the more-general noncommutative case. Langlands’ conjectures have dominated the field since they were proposed, and their proof would unify large areas of algebra, number theory, and analysis, but proving them was exceptionally difficult. One part of the Langlands program was dubbed the Fundamental Lemma because much of the program depended on its being true.