About Ngô Bảo Châu
Ngô Bảo Châu (Vietnamese: [ŋo ɓa᷉ːw cəw], born 28 June 1972) is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Hong Kong, 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. == Early life == Ngô Bảo Châu was born in 1972, the 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. The beginning of Châu's schooling was at an experimental elementary school that had been founded by the revolutionary pedagogue Hồ Ngọc Đại, but when his father returned from the Soviet Union with his doctoral degree, he decided that Châu would learn more in traditional schools and enrolled him in the "chuyên toán" (special classes for gifted students in mathematics) at the Trưng Vương Middle School. At age 15, Châu entered the special mathematics class at the High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi University of Science (Khối chuyên Tổng Hợp – Đại học Khoa Học Tự Nhiên Hà Nội), formerly known as the A0-class. In grades 11 and 12, Châu participated in the 29th and 30th International Mathematical Olympiads (IMO) and became the first Vietnamese student to win two IMO gold medals, of which the first one was won with a perfect score (42/42). After high school, Châu 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. After visiting Châu's father, Paul Germain, secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, arranged for Châu to study in France.
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