1. Ngo Bao Chau

Professor Ngo Bao Chau will teach at the University of Hong Kong (China) - Asia's top-ranked university on the QS World University Rankings 2026 - starting next June. Previously, he worked in the mathematics department at the University of Chicago (US) since 2010.

He is the only Vietnamese to date to have won the Fields Medal (in 2010), often called the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics", for proving the "fundamental lemma" of the Langlands Program.

Professor Chau stated that he had been considering a move to Asia for over one year, partly to be closer to his aging parents and partly to fulfill his desire to more deeply and regularly train young mathematics enthusiasts in Vietnam.

Born in 1972, Professor Chau attended the High School for Gifted Students, University of Natural Sciences, and was the first Vietnamese to win two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (in 1988 and 1989). He became Vietnam's youngest professor in 2004 and has served as scientific director at the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics since 2010.

2. Vu Ha Van

Another Vietnamese mathematician, Professor Vu Ha Van, joined the mathematics department at the University of Hong Kong in January.

Professor Van's name is associated with several world-challenging problems over decades, such as the Erdős–Folkman problem in number theory and Shamir's conjecture in random graph theory. He also collaborated with Terence Tao, a 2006 Fields Medal recipient, to prove the circular law conjecture and the four-moment theorem, considered significant milestones in random matrix theory.

Professor Van is the recipient of several major international awards, including the George Polya Prize (2008) from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (US) and the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize (2012) from the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society (US).

Born in 1970 in Hanoi, Mr. Van is an alumnus of the specialized mathematics programs at Chu Van An High School and Hanoi-Amsterdam High School. He earned his doctorate in mathematics from Yale University (US) in 1998 and began teaching there in 2011.

3. Joshua Zahl

Last June, Joshua Zahl left the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada to take on a full-time professorship at the Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University (China), according to the university's website.

Zahl, 40, made waves in the mathematical community when he, along with collaborator Wang Hong - a strong contender for the 2026 Fields Medal - solved the century-old problem of the Kakeya conjecture in three-dimensional space.

Additionally, Zahl has made contributions to various areas of mathematics, including discrete mathematics, Fourier analysis, and geometric measure theory.

Zahl completed his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013.

From left: Professor Joshua Zahl, Ngo Bao Chau, and Vu Ha Van. *Photo: UBC, HKU, VinUniversity*

4. Yitang Zhang

Also in 6/2025, Sun Yat-sen University (China) announced the successful recruitment of mathematician Yitang Zhang from the University of California, Santa Barbara (US).

Zhang is best known for his groundbreaking work on prime numbers. In 2013, he was the first to prove that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers separated by a finite gap, marking a significant advance in solving the twin prime conjecture - a fundamental unsolved mathematical problem.

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Zhang showed mathematical talent from an early age. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, he did not attend high school but self-studied and was admitted to Peking University in 1978. He received his doctorate from Purdue University (US) in 1991.

5. Liu Jun

In 9/2025, Liu Jun confirmed he would return to teach at Tsinghua University - the campus where he was born and raised 63 years ago.

Liu earned his bachelor's degree at Peking University and his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1991. Subsequently, he worked for over 30 years at Harvard University, becoming a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Statistical Association.

Liu has made pioneering contributions to Bayesian inference: a statistical inference method, computational biology, and bioinformatics. To date, he has advised over 40 doctoral students and more than 30 postdoctoral researchers. Most are now working at leading universities, or at Wall Street, Google, and Microsoft.

6. Daqing Wan

Daqing Wan, 62, recently confirmed his retirement from the University of California, Irvine (US), to work at Chongqing University.

He is renowned in international mathematical circles for proving several famous conjectures in modern number theory, notably Dwork's conjecture, which dates back to 1973. This is considered a fundamental basis for understanding the behavior of prime numbers.

For this work, he won the Morningside Medal in 2001 - the highest honor for Chinese mathematicians.

In his youth, he was considered a prodigy, passing the mathematics entrance exam for Chengdu University of Technology at the age of 14. In 1991, he earned his doctorate from the University of Washington (US) and remained there to work.

7. Wu Meng

According to Hunan University's website, Wu Meng joined the university's mathematics department last August as a full-time professor of fundamental mathematics. Previously, he taught at the University of Oulu, one of Finland's largest universities.

Wu gained recognition in 2019 for solving a problem that had persisted for over 50 years, related to Furstenberg's conjecture, which examines how numbers change structure when represented in different base systems.

In his early career, Wu earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Picardy Jules Verne (France) in 2006. He also pursued postgraduate studies there, receiving his doctorate in 2013.

8. Li Hanfeng

Similar to Daqing Wan, Professor Li Hanfeng chose Chongqing University as his destination upon returning to China, leaving his position at the University at Buffalo (US).

His research focuses on functional analysis, operator algebras, non-commutative geometry, dynamical systems, and combinatorial number theory. He is one of the rare mathematicians whose papers have been published in all four of the field's most esteemed journals: Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and Acta Mathematica.

Li received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University in 1997 and earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002.

In recent years, China has actively attracted foreign scientists, researchers, and experts. A notable example is the "Thousand Talents Program," a high-level talent recruitment initiative that provides favorable visa conditions and generous financial incentives.

Khanh Linh (Compiled)