VIETNAM: Pledge to strengthen maths after Medal win

Vietnam has announced it will invest more than US$33 million by 2020 to develop its mathematics curriculum, following news that an expatriate Vietnamese mathematician, Dr Ngo Bao Chau, this year won the Fields Medal, widely regarded as the most prestigious global award in mathematics.

Chau, 38, the first Vietnamese to win the coveted International Mathematical Union's Fields Medal, said at the award presentation ceremony in Hyderabad, India it would "breathe a new life into science and tertiary education in Vietnam".

In a letter to Chau, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung wrote that the award offered "strong encouragement for Vietnamese young scientists". In his announcement in August, the prime minister said the new funding was aimed at improving mathematics education by training more qualified lecturers.

Chau works at the Université Paris-Sud in France and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University in the US. He will begin working at the University of Chicago this month. One of his proofs of a 1979 theory of the Canadian-American mathematician Robert Langlands was described by Time magazine as the "seventh-most important scientific discovery of 2009".

Under the new plan, Vietnam will create a mathematics research institute to facilitate collaboration between Vietnamese and foreign mathematicians.

Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said Chau could be the first director of the proposed institute.

"We need to create opportunities for our mathematicians who have the capacity to work at international level," Nhan told the official Vietnamese newspaper Dan Tri.

A number of university maths faculties will also be developed into regional maths training and research centres within a decade and the government wants the number of publications in international mathematics journals to double from the 2010 figure.

"Education ministry and other government officials have conferred with our own and foreign leading mathematicians to ask how to raise Vietnam's mathematics level in the world. The scientists say Vietnam now ranks 60th in the world, though we have the 12th largest population," Nhan said.

"If we do not make big changes, we were told, we will not be able to have sustainable development in national mathematics. That's why the government has decided to deploy a national focus programme on mathematics development for the next 10 years."

However, Vietnamese mathematicians said any strategy for improving mathematics should include plans to improve salaries for mathematics researchers.

Many have to take second jobs to make ends meet, said Mai Duc Thanh, a mathematics lecturer at Ho Chi Minh City International University.

Thanh said $1,000 per month was a fair salary, but mathematicians with PhDs working at Vietnamese universities typically make as little as $200 per month.

"They can do mathematics very well, but they have to provide for their families, so they don't have time for research," Thanh told University World News.

Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology announced in 2008 it would increase pay for some scientists working at Vietnamese institutions to between $1,000 and $2,000 a month.