Lê Văn Thiêm
Native spelling: Lê Văn Thiêm
1918–1991, Đức Thọ, Hà Tĩnh, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Pioneer of modern Vietnamese mathematics: the first Vietnamese to earn a doctorate in mathematics, a contributor to Nevanlinna value-distribution theory in complex analysis, and founding president of the Vietnam Mathematical Society.
Lê Văn Thiêm was born in Đức Thọ, Hà Tĩnh, into a family with a scholarly tradition and went to France in 1939 to study at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He defended his Göttingen mathematics dissertation in 1945 and received the doctoral certificate in 1946 — the first Vietnamese to earn a mathematics doctorate — then earned a French State Doctorate of Science in 1948 before becoming a professor at the University of Zurich.
His European research addressed the inverse problem of Rolf Nevanlinna's value-distribution theory for meromorphic functions and the theory of Riemann surfaces, followed later by applications of complex analysis to fluid filtration and explosion mechanics.
In 1949, answering President Hồ Chí Minh's call, he left his position in Zurich and returned to Vietnam during the resistance war to build higher education from the ground up. Alongside Hoàng Tụy he is regarded as one of the two founders of modern Vietnamese mathematics: he served as the first director of the Basic Science School and the Pedagogical University, founding president of the Vietnam Mathematical Society from 1966, and the first director of the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics from 1975 to 1980. He was posthumously awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize in Science and Technology in 1996.
Workplaces: University of Zurich, Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam Institute of Mathematics
Vietnam