Time Magazine on December 9 announced its top ten lists for 2009, and includes Vietnamese Professor Ngo Bao Chau’s solving of the “fundamental lemma”.

Prof. Ngo Bao Chau (second from the left) at the awards ceremony of the Oberwofach Mathematics Institute in 2004.

According to the Time Magazine, in 1979 the Canadian-American mathematician Robert Langlands developed an ambitious and revolutionary theory that connected two branches of mathematics called number theory and group theory. The theory captured deep symmetries associated with equations involving whole numbers, laying out what is now known as the Langlands program.

Langlands knew that the task of proving assumptions that underlie his theory would be the work of generations. But he was convinced that one stepping stone that needed confirmation which was dubbed, the “fundamental lemma” - would be reasonably straightforward.

He, his collaborators and his students were able to prove special cases of this fundamental theorem. But proving the general case proved more difficult than anticipated - so difficult, in fact, that it took 30 years to finally achieve.

Over the past few years, Prof. Ngo Bao Chau, 37, who currently works at Université Paris-Sud and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, formulated an ingenious proof of the fundamental lemma. When it was checked this year and confirmed to be correct, mathematicians around the globe breathed a sigh of relief. Mathematicians’ work in this area in the last three decades was predicated on the principle that the fundamental lemma was indeed accurate and would one day be proved.

“It’s as if people were working on the far side of the river waiting for someone to build a bridge across,” says Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at IAS. “And now all of sudden everyone’s work on the other side of the river has been proven.”

Ngo Bao Chau twice won gold at the international mathematics Olympiad when he was a high-school student. After taking a Ph.D diploma in France, he was invited to teach at the Université Paris-Sud and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. Chau was also the first Vietnamese person to win the Clay mathematics award and is among the youngest professors in Vietnam. He was presented this title at the age of 33.

The ten top scientific discoveries 2009 on the Time Magazine:

 Our Oldest Ancestor, “Ardi”

 The Human Epigenome, Decoded

 Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness

 A Robot Performs Science

 Breeding Tuna on Land

 Water on the Moon

 The Fundamental Lemma, Solved

 Teleportation!

 The Large Hadron Collider, Revived

 A New Planet (or Brown Dwarf?) Discovered

VietNamNet/Time Magazine