Of the 75 candidates meeting the standards to qualify as professor this year, Si Duc Quang, 38, lecturer of the Hanoi University of Education, is the youngest.

Mr Si Duc Quang

“When I was at secondary school, I was a member of the team of excellent students in literature. However, when I read Toan hoc va tuoi tre’ (math and the youth) journals lent by my friends, I immediately developed a passion for math with theorems, formulas and proofs,” he recalled.

With the second prize he got from the national competition for excellent students in mathematics, Quang was enrolled in the mathematics major class of the Math & Informatics Faculty at the Hanoi University of Education, without having to attend the university entrance exam.

The only wish of the student at that time was to continue learning math.

Si Duc Quang was a member of the team of excellent students in literature at secondary school, but he studied mathematics at university, and is now a mathematics professor.

When reading science journals, Quang admired articles by seniors such as Le Quang Nam, who won the gold medal in a competition in Asia Pacific, and Vu Viet Anh, who won the gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1998.

At the end of the first year at university, during a seminar Quang met Vu Viet Anh, who taught differential manifolds, a subject in differential geometry.

“Perhaps those were the most beautiful things about mathematics that I had ever learned up to that moment. That is why I decided to choose geometry as my study subject later,” he said.

“We went to school not to obtain high exam scores, but to accumulate knowledge and research experience. We soon defined a path to follow in the future – doing scientific research,” he said.

In 2003, after graduating from university, Quang became a postgraduate and defended his thesis to obtain a master’s degree. After that, he left Vietnam for Japan. After obtaining a doctorate at Tokyo University, he returned to Vietnam. Later, he left Vietnam once again for postdoc training course at Oberwolfach Institute in Germany. In 2013, he came to France and defended his dissertation at Université de Bretagne Occidentale.

After that, Quang decided to return to Vietnam with the wish to study further in theoretical mathematics and contribute to the development of the university where he studied.

In 2012, the 2010-2020 national program on math development kicked off and the first step of the program was the establishment of the Advanced Mathematics Research Institute. Quang was one of the first mathematicians to receive benefits from the program.

In 2019, he became the youngest professor in Vietnam. 

Le Huyen

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