- 2010 Fields Medal
Intro
Ngô Bào Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician. Now he is the Professor at the University of Chicago. In 2010 he won the Fields Medal for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad. He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.
Education and Work Experience
1997, Ph.D. from University of Paris-Sud
2007-2010, Member of Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
2010-Present, Professor in University of Chicago
2011-Present, Scientific Director, Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics
Honors and Awards
2004, Clay Research Award
2007, Sophie Germain Prize
2010, Fields Medal
2011, Legion of Honour
Major Academic Achievements
Châu first came to prominence by proving, in joint work with Gérard Laumon, the fundamental lemma for unitary groups. Their general strategy was to understand the local orbital integrals appearing in the fundamental lemma in terms of affine Springer fibers arising in the Hitchin fibration. This allowed them to employ the tools of geometric representation theory, namely the theory of perverse sheaves, to study what was initially a combinatorial problem of a number-theoretic nature. Chau eventually succeeded in formulating the proof for the fundamental lemma for Lie algebras in 2008. Together with results from Jean-Loup Waldspurger, who had earlier deduced stronger forms of the fundamental lemma from this result, this completed the proof of the fundamental lemma in all cases.