Hundreds of people came to Hanoi’s Noi Bai Airport Saturday to welcome home Professor Ngo Bao Chau, who won the Fields Medal – popularly known as the Nobel Prize for mathematics – in India on August 19.

Professor Ngo Bao Chau holds flowers presented by the general public at Noi Bai Airport, Hanoi on August 28, 2010 (Photo: Vietnam+)

The mathematician, the first Vietnamese to take the world renowned prize, arrived at the airport in the morning.

Also waiting at the airport with the 38-year-old professor’s family were Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Vinh Hien, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Le Dinh Tien, Prof. Tran Van Nhung, general secretary of the State Professorship Council, and leaders of Vietnam Institute of Mathematics, the country’s Mathematicians Association, and National University Hanoi.

After the welcome ceremony at the airport, Prof. Chau went home, also in the capital.

An official meeting will be held Sunday at the National Convention Center to honor the Fields Medal winner, who is best-known for proving the fundamental lemma proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad, an achievement which was selected by Time Magazine as one of the Top Ten Scientific Discoveries of 2009.

Vietnam Television is to broadcast live the event, which will be attended by representatives of the Party, State, Ministry of Education and Training, Ministry of Science and Technology, Institute of Science and Technology of Vietnam, Institute of Mathematics, National University Hanoi and other organizations.

India hosted the International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest congregation of mathematicians all over the world, in Hyderabad in nine days from August 19. Chau, a mathematics professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, received the Fields Medal on the first day of the congress.

He will join the University of Chicago’s Mathematics Faculty in the US early this September.

Source: Saigon giai phong