The University of Hong Kong (HKU), China, announced Professor Vu Ha Van's appointment on its official website on 26/1. HKU is currently ranked as Asia's number one university by the QS 2026 rankings.

HKU expects Professor Vu Ha Van to become a key figure, strengthening research capabilities in both pure and applied mathematics. This move comes as science and technology increasingly demand deep theoretical foundations. "His presence will strongly promote international cooperation networks, playing a crucial role in training the next generation of mathematicians for the region and the world," the university's website stated.

Professor Vu Ha Van. Photo: *Faculty of Science, University of Hong Kong*.

Professor Vu Ha Van has made pivotal contributions in the fields of combinatorics, probability, and random matrix theory. Born in 1970 in Hanoi, he was a mathematics-specialized student at Chu Van An High School and Hanoi - Amsterdam High School. After graduating from high school, he received a scholarship to Eötvös Lorand University, Hungary, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1994. 4 years later, he earned his PhD in Mathematics from Yale University, US.

From 2001 to 2005, he worked at the University of California-San Diego. In late 2005, he became a full professor at Rutgers University before joining Yale University in 2011.

Professor Van's name is associated with problems that challenged the world for decades. In number theory, he collaborated with mathematician Endre Szemeredi to solve the Erdős–Folkman problem. In the field of random graph theory, he and his collaborators Anders Johansson and Jeff Kahn successfully tackled Shamir's conjecture. He previously collaborated with Fields Medalist mathematician Terence Tao to prove the circular law conjecture and the four-moment theorem. These are important milestones in random matrix theory.

According to the University of Hong Kong, Professor Vu Ha Van's research works are not limited to pure theory but also form the "backbone" for many modern scientific fields. Random matrix theory currently plays a foundational role in quantum physics, complex systems, and especially artificial intelligence (AI). This theory is an essential tool for modeling quantum behaviors, analyzing big data, and evaluating the stability of complex algorithms. His research has directly contributed to building the theoretical framework for these computations.

Professor Van has received many major international awards, such as the George Polya Prize (2008) from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize (2012) from the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society. In 2018, Professor Van became Director of the Institute of Big Data and also Director of the VinIF Innovation Foundation.

Hong Kong is emerging as a global talent hub, with its universities boosting efforts to attract foreign scholars through special funding and recruitment programs.

Khanh Linh