Vietnamese mathematician becomes country’s first to win Germany’s prestigious Humboldt Research Award

According to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Hai, 56, was nominated by Professor Christopher Deninger, a mathematician at the University of Münster whose work focuses on arithmetic geometry. The Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) announced the honor on April 16.

The Humboldt Research Award is granted to up to 100 internationally leading scientists from outside Germany each year, in recognition of their entire research record. Each recipient receives €80,000 (US$94,000) to pursue a research project in Germany in collaboration with host scientists.

Selection for the award is made by independent peer reviewers appointed by the foundation, with decisions finalized twice a year.

Hai’s mathematical talent was recognized at age 17, when he left Hanoi for the Soviet Union as a member of Vietnam’s Mathematical Olympiad team. He earned his diploma from Lomonosov Moscow State University at age 22, then completed his PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich four years later in 1996 under the supervision of algebraist Bodo Pareigis.

In 2004, he finished his habilitation, Germany’s higher doctorate, at the University of Duisburg-Essen with a thesis on matrix quantum groups.

His research spans quantum groups, Hopf algebras, and category theory, with papers published in leading international journals including the Journal of Algebra, Annales de l’Institut Fourier, and Mathematische Zeitschrift.

In 2006 the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded him its von Kaven Award for his work on quantum groups. The DFG announcement described his Heisenberg fellowship research as extending Tannaka duality into new territory connected to algebraic geometry.

In 2009, Hai became the first Vietnamese scientist elected a Young Affiliate of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), a position he held until 2013, according to the TWAS directory. He was conferred the title of professor through special recognition in 2012.

He served as director of the VAST Institute of Mathematics from 2017 to 2022 and concurrently as general secretary of the Vietnam Mathematical Society.

VAST said the Humboldt honor affirms the rising international standing of Vietnamese basic sciences and opens the door to deeper research collaboration between Vietnam and Germany.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation traces its origins to Berlin in 1860, established 18 months after the death of the Prussian naturalist and explorer it is named after. The original foundation lost its endowment capital during Germany’s 1923 hyperinflation and was re-established twice, most recently as a non-profit foundation in Bonn on Dec. 10, 1953, under the leadership of Nobel laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg. It now maintains a network of more than 30,000 Humboldtians in over 140 countries, including 63 Nobel Prize winners.

Ha joins a small group of Vietnam-based scientists to receive major prizes from the foundation, though he is the first to win the Humboldt Research Award itself.

Professor Nguyen The Hoang of the 108 Central Military Hospital in Hanoi received the foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award in 2012 for his work on microsurgical tissue transplantation. Professor Nguyen Xuan Hung of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology won the Georg Forster Research Award in 2015 for research in computational engineering.