Meet the perfect-score Olympiad champ and Fields Medalist protégé joining Ngo Bao Chau’s math mission for Vietnam

Tuan, now Director of Research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the only member of the group based in France, is among the most decorated products of Vietnam’s elite math pipeline.

He earned his doctorate under Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, works at the Laboratoire de Mathématiques Nicolas Oresme at the University of Caen Normandy, teaches part-time at École Polytechnique, and has held a Chair of Excellence funded by the Normandy region since 2022.

The Vietnamese math talent initiative, called “Converging Scholars,” was unveiled on March 6 by Chau, scientific director of the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM). VIASM said the program aims to develop world-class mathematicians inside Vietnam, reducing the country’s long-standing dependence on overseas universities to train its research elite.

Tuan joins five other internationally established Vietnamese mathematicians in the program. Four are based in the U.S.: Dao Hai Long at the University of Kansas, Nguyen Xuan Long at the University of Michigan, Ha Huy Tai who chairs the mathematics department at Tulane University, and Nguyen Trong Toan of Pennsylvania State University. The sixth, Phan Thanh Nam, is a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the first Vietnamese national to win the European Mathematical Society Prize.

Tuan’s research sits in number theory and arithmetic geometry, particularly Drinfeld modules and the Langlands program, the same broad area in which both Chau and Laurent Lafforgue produced their Fields Medal-winning work.

His path through Vietnam’s math pipeline began at the High School for Gifted Students, Hanoi University of Science, Vietnam National University, the same school that produced Chau and several other future IMO champions.

Representing Vietnam at the 36th IMO in Toronto in 1995, Tuan posted a perfect 42 out of 42, the first Vietnamese contestant to score full marks in six years. He returned to the 37th IMO in Mumbai the following year and won a second gold with 37 points, becoming the third Vietnamese student to win back-to-back IMO golds, after Chau in 1988 and 1989 and Dao Hai Long in 1994 and 1995.

Tuan continued his studies in France on a scholarship to attend École Polytechnique from 1998 to 2000 as part of the X97 promotion. He then enrolled in a master’s degree jointly run by Polytechnique, Paris-Sud, and ENS Paris-Ulm, before beginning his doctorate at Paris-Sud (Orsay) in 2001 under Lafforgue. Lafforgue, then a professor at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) near Paris, won the Fields Medal in 2002, during Tuan’s doctoral studies, for his proof of a major case of the Langlands conjectures.

According to his CNRS profile, Tuan spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at IHES after defending his thesis in 2004, then joined CNRS in 2005 as a permanent researcher. He was promoted to Director of Research, the agency’s senior research rank, in 2021.

He also spent two semesters as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in fall 2006 and spring 2008, with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Princeton institute, which has counted Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel among its past members, is where Chau himself was a member from 2007 to 2010, the period during which he produced his Fields Medal-winning proof.

Tuan’s CNRS profile lists him on the steering committee of the France-Vietnam International Research Laboratory in Mathematics, a joint French-Vietnamese research structure backed by CNRS, VAST, and VIASM that launched in January 2023. He also coordinates number theory for the France-Korea International Research Network in Mathematics.

Under the Converging Scholars program, Tuan and the other five mathematicians have committed to spending two to three months per year in Vietnam over the next three years, co-supervising doctoral candidates at the University of Science (HUS) under Vietnam National University, Hanoi, alongside Chau and VIASM executive director Le Minh Ha.

The program is expected to expand to include additional senior researchers over time.