Ngô Bảo Châu
fl. 1972, Hanoi, Vietnam
Vietnamese-French mathematician who proved the Fundamental Lemma of the Langlands programme in 2008, becoming the first Vietnamese citizen to receive the Fields Medal (2010).
Ngô Bảo Châu was born in Hanoi to a physicist father and physician mother, and attended specialized mathematics classes in secondary school. He was the first Vietnamese student to win two International Mathematical Olympiad gold medals (1988 and 1989, with a perfect score in 1989). He moved to France in 1990 and studied at Paris-Sud University (Orsay) and the École Normale Supérieure, earning his PhD in 1997 under Gérard Laumon.
The Fundamental Lemma, conjectured by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad in the 1980s, is a technical but essential identity of orbital integrals needed to make the Langlands programme's trace formula rigorous; many results in the theory of automorphic forms depended on assuming it. Ngô and Laumon proved the lemma for unitary groups in 2004, work recognised with the Clay Research Award, and in 2008 Ngô completed the proof for all reductive groups using methods from the geometry of the Hitchin fibration and perverse sheaves — a breakthrough Time magazine named one of the top scientific discoveries of 2009.
For this achievement, Ngô received the Fields Medal at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, the first Vietnamese citizen so honoured. He joined the University of Chicago as a professor in 2010, after periods at CNRS and the Institute for Advanced Study, and continues to work on the Langlands programme and arithmetic geometry.
Workplaces: CNRS, University of Paris-Sud (Orsay), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, University of Chicago
Vietnam, France