Award-winning mathematician joins IU faculty

The Scientific Prize of the Institute of Mathematics was awarded to Nam Le, IU’s newest Department of Mathematics faculty member.

The honor is given every two years to a mathematician younger than 40 years old who has made outstanding achievements in mathematical research.

Le has yet to arrive on campus and enter the classroom, but his reputation precedes him.

Le, a former Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University and now at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, has been recognized as that country’s top young mathematician.

In 2012, Le was named a Visiting Fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Institute at Australian National University. In the same year, Le visited IU and spoke about the
“Linearized Monge-Ampère equation and its geometric applications” at a Department of Mathematics research colloquium.

The IU math community welcomes his arrival to Bloomington with anticipation, said Kevin Zumbrun, chair of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Mathematics.

“We are pleased and excited that Nam Le will be joining the IU-Bloomington family as our department’s newest faculty member this fall,”

Zumbrun said in an IU press release. “For him to begin what we hope will be a long and productive career here on the heels of his country’s most prestigious award for a young mathematician bodes well for both the department and for the Indiana University
family.”

Le was most recently a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and a
senior researcher at the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, both in Hanoi. Before that, he was a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

According to an IU press release, in 2002 he received a bachelor’s of science in mathematics from Vietnam National University, where he was named valedictorian.

Le’s broad mathematical interests are in partial differential equations, geometric analysis and the calculus of variations.

His specific areas of research and study include linearized Monge-Ampère equations and their applications to nonlinear, fourth-order geometric partial differential equations, mean curvature flow, and gamma-convergence and its applications in mathematical physics, according to the release.

Hannah Alani