Vietnamese Math Prodigy Professor Le Hong Van Passes Away, Bridging Fields

Professor Le Hong Van, a renowned Vietnamese mathematician and the youngest woman to earn a Doctor of Science degree, passed away on September 2 in Prague, Czech Republic, at the age of 63. Her sudden death has brought profound sorrow to scientists who collaborated with her. Born in 1961, Professor Van, the second daughter of former Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Professional Secondary Education Le Van Giang, displayed exceptional mathematical talent from a young age. At 16, she qualified to represent Vietnam in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), though a lack of funding prevented her participation. She later studied at Moscow State University, where she obtained her doctorate under Professor A.T. Fomenko, who had solved the multi-dimensional absolute Plateau problem. In 1987, she earned her doctorate for her thesis "Minimal Surfaces in Homogeneous Spaces." Two years later, at 28, she defended her work "Efficient Regularizations in the Theory of Minimal Surfaces," becoming the youngest Vietnamese woman to achieve a Doctor of Science degree. Her research, stemming from the physicist Joseph Plateau's question about the existence of a minimal surface bounded by a closed curve, opened up profound problems in geometry, partial differential equations, and optimal structures. This field has contributed to the advancement of modern mathematics and has diverse applications in architecture, material science, biology, theoretical physics, and computer graphics. Professor Van received the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize in 1990 and the Majorana Prize from ICTP (Italy) in 1991, both as a young researcher. These achievements underscore her status as one of the outstanding mathematicians of her time. Subsequently, she conducted research at leading German mathematical institutions, including the Max Planck Institute and the Leipzig Institute for Mathematics. Since 2005, she was affiliated with the Institute of Mathematics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), expanding her research interests from differential geometry to symplectic topology, geometric analysis, representation theory, geometric statistics, and machine learning theory. She led three government-funded scientific projects in the Czech Republic and published nearly 70 papers. In 2017, she co-authored "Information Geometry" with Springer Nature, which became a standard reference in the field. In recent years, she focused on the mathematical foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). During the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed an epidemiological model applying wavelet theory, predicting multiple waves of the outbreak, highlighting her applied capabilities. She actively worked to bridge Vietnamese mathematics with the global community, delivering lectures at international conferences and universities. In her final years, she was working on a book exceeding 600 pages on the mathematical foundations of AI and drafting several papers on modern geometry issues. Source: VnExpress