Van H. Vu ( vi, Vũ Hà Văn) is a Vietnamese

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

.CV
from Vu's web site

Education and career

Vu was born in Hanoi (Vietnam) in 1970. He went to special math classes for gifted children at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Hungary for his undergraduate studies, and obtained his M. Sc in mathematics at the

Faculty of Sciences Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process (the scientific method), some ...

of the Eötvös University, Budapest, in 1994. His thesis supervisor was

Tamás Szőnyi Tamás Szőnyi (born July 23, 1957, Budapest) is a Hungarian mathematician, doing research in discrete mathematics, particularly finite geometry and algebraic coding theory. He is full professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Eötvö ...

. He received his Ph.D. at

, in 1998 under the direction of

László Lovász László Lovász (; born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He ...

. He worked as a postdoc at IAS and

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

(1998-2001). He joined the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

as an assistant professor in 2001 and was promoted to full professor in 2005. In Fall 2005, he moved to Rutgers University and stayed there until he joined Yale in Fall 2011. Vu was a member at IAS on three occasions (1998, 2005, 2007), the last time (2007) as the leader of the special program
Arithmetic Combinatorics

Contributions

In his PhD thesis, Vu, together with Kim, developed a theory for concentration of measure of polynomials (and non-Lipschitz functions in general). Later, as an application, he established a refinement of Waring's problem. In 2003, Vu and Szemeredi solved the Erdos-Folkman problem, answering the following question: How dense a set of positive integers should be so every sufficiently large integer can be represented as a subsum? In 2006, with Tao and Vu published their book "Additive Combinatorics.” Together, they developed the Inverse Littlewood-Offord theory for anti-concentration. In 2007, with Johansson and Kahn, Vu solved the Shamir conjecture in random graph theory. Among others, they established the sharp threshold for the existence of a perfect matching in a random hypergraph. In 2010,

Terence Tao Terence Chi-Shen Tao (; born 17 July 1975) is an Australian-American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. His research includes ...

and Vu solved the

circular law In probability theory, more specifically the study of random matrices, the circular law concerns the distribution of eigenvalues of an random matrix with independent and identically distributed entries in the limit . It asserts that for any seque ...

conjecture in random matrix theory, which established the non-Hermitian version of Wigner semi-circle law. In 2011, they proved the "four moment" theorem, establishing universality of local law of eigenvalues of random matrices. Similar results were obtained around the same time by László Erdös, Horng-Tzer Yau, and Jun Yin; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao#Random_matrices

Awards and honors

As a junior researcher, Vu was a recipient of an NSF Career Award and a Sloan fellowship. In 2008 he was awarded the Pólya Prize of the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific socie ...

for his work on

concentration of measure In mathematics, concentration of measure (about a median) is a principle that is applied in measure theory, probability and combinatorics, and has consequences for other fields such as Banach space theory. Informally, it states that "A random var ...

. In 2012, Vu was awarded the

Fulkerson Prize The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at e ...

(jointly with Anders Johansson and

Jeff Kahn Jeffry Ned Kahn is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University notable for his work in combinatorics. Education Kahn received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1979 after completing his dissertation under his advisor Dijen K. Ray-Cha ...

) for the solution of Shamir problem. Also in 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-08-29. In the same year, he was a Medallion lecturer at the 8th World congress in Probability and Statistics, Istanbul. In 2014, he was an invited speaker at the ICM (Seoul). In 2020, he became a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. By Mathscinet statistics (as in 2022), he ranks third among the most cited mathematicians with PhD in 1998 (behind E. Candes and C. Villani) https://mathcitations.github.io/

References

External links

Vu's current personal website at YaleVu's web site at Rutgers
1970s births Living people 20th-century Vietnamese mathematicians Vietnamese emigrants to the United States Yale University alumni Rutgers University faculty University of California, San Diego faculty Additive combinatorialists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 21st-century American mathematicians {{Asia-mathematician-stub