Opening remarks
Nicholas Yap – Head Boy
On behalf of the students of The British International School, I am delighted to welcome Professor Ngô Bảo Châu, the 2010 Fields Medal Recipient, as our keynote speaker in the 4th ASEAN event series “Bridges –Dialogues Towards a Culture of Peace”. This visit is facilitated by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation and Viet Nam’s Ministry of Education and Training
Professor Ngô Bảo Châu is the fifth keynote speaker visiting Vietnam as part of the 4th ASEAN “Bridges” programme, after the visits of Economics Nobel Laureate Prof. Roger B. Myerson, Medicine Nobel Laureate Prof. Harald zur Hausen, Physics Nobel Laureate Douglas D. Osheroff and Chemistry Nobel Laureate Prof. Sir Harold W. Kroto. The 4th ASEAN “Bridges” event series follows from 450 events which the International Peace Foundation has hosted in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Cambodia since 2003.
Thirty eight Nobel Laureates as well as 18 other keynote speakers and artists have participated in these events aimed to support education in the ASEAN region. These speakers have included Vladimir Ashkenazy, Dr. Hans Blix, Jackie Chan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Vanessa Mae, Jessye Norman, Dame Anita Roddick, Oliver Stone and Dr. James Wolfensohn. The programme deals with the overall theme of "building a culture of peace and development in a globalized world", bridging Vietnamese and foreign perspectives.
The topics cover a wide range of issues and especially highlight the challenges of both globalization and regionalism and its impact on development and international cooperation. The aim of “Bridges” is to facilitate and strengthen dialogue and communication between societies in Southeast Asia with their multiple cultures and faiths as well as with peoples in other parts of the world to promote understanding and trust.
The events build bridges through Nobel Laureates with local universities and other institutions in Southeast Asia to establish long-term relationships which may result in common research programs and other forms of collaboration. By enhancing science, technology and education as a basis for peace and development the events aim towards a better cooperation for the advancement of peace, freedom and security in the region with the active involvement of the young generation, ASEAN’s key to the future.
Annette Wu - Head Girl
Professor Ngô Bảo Châu is a mathematician at the University of Chicago who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 and who is best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms.
Professor Châu was born in 1972 in Hanoi and at the age of 15 was admitted into a mathematics-specializing class of the Vietnam National University High School. In grades 11 and 12 he participated in the 29th and 30th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and became the first Vietnamese student to win two gold medals, of which the first was won with a perfect score.
After high school Ngô Bảo Châu went on to study at the École Normale Supérieure. He obtained a PhD in 1997 from the Universite Paris-Sud. He became member of CNRS at the Paris Trieze University, where he stayed from 1998 to 2005. Professor Châu became professor at Paris-Sud Onze University in 2005.
Also in 2005 he received the title of professor in Vietnam and became the youngest professor ever in Vietnam at the age of 33. Since 2007 he has worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. He joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Chicago in 2010, and was appointed in 2011 by the Prime Minister of Vietnam to head the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics in Hanoi. In 2010 Professor. Châu was awarded the Fields Medal in a ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians meeting in Hyderabad.
He was praised for his "brilliant proof" of a 30-year-old mathematical conundrum known as the fundamental lemma. This proof offered a key stepping stone to establishing and exploring a revolutionary theory put forward in 1979 by Canadian-American mathematician Professor Robert Langlands that connected two branches of mathematics called number theory and group theory.
"It's as if people were working on the far side of the river waiting for someone to throw this bridge across," Prof. Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, said of Professor Châu's historic breakthrough. "And now all of sudden everyone's work on the other side of the river has been proven"
Professor Châu's proof of the general case was selected by Time magazine as one of the top ten scientific discoveries of 2009. The Fields Medal, founded by the Canadian John Fields and first awarded in 1936, is widely viewed as the highest honour a mathematician can receive.
We are indeed honoured and delighted to welcome Professor Châu to throw some bridges across our intellectual and social rivers here at the British International School. I would now like to welcome Mr. Richard Dyer, Head Teacher at BIS, to deliver his opening address.
Mr. Dyer’s opening address
Ladies and gentlemen, students, honoured guests, Mr. Daniel Bednarik, Mr. Uwe Morowetz, Professor Ngô Bảo Châu. It is indeed an honour and a privilege for BIS to host today’s International Peace Foundation’s Bridges Dialogue and to welcome Professor Ngô Bảo Châu, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of our time and the first Vietnamese recipient of the highest honour in mathematics, the Fields Medal. It is a particular privilege for the British International School, Ho Chi Minh City, to be able to support the cause of the International Peace Foundation, a cause close to my heart and close to the hearts of all of the BIS community.
As a head teacher, I rarely get a chance to talk about my own specialist subject, the subject I spent some 25 years teaching. That subject is mathematics and now I have a stage, an audience and a distinguished mathematician, so I can’t resist. So, please indulge me for a few brief moments while I share some thoughts about mathematics, about the mission of the British International School and about how that connects with the mission of the Bridges programme.
Mathematics is awesome. I don’t say that in the trivial manner which is implied by the use of the word awesome. Awesome has been over-used in recent years and has lost some of its power, its glow. Perhaps I should say, “Mathematics is awe-inspiring.” Mathematics has huge potential to inspire awe and wonder, arouse enormous respect, and even fear and anxiety. That is the nature of awe, that is the nature of things that are truly awesome.
Let me see if I can bring that home to you. We have all, at some point in our education, had experience of that most fundamental of quantities, the number that appears, as if by magic when we divide the distance round the circumference of a circle by the distance across the centre. Do this with any circle, anywhere and out pops the number which starts off 3.14159265358979323… and on it goes, forever, never repeating, never ending, never showing any sort of pattern. It is called “irrational” . It’s called “transcendental” - evocative and awe-inspiring terms in themselves. Isn’t that strange? A number so fundamental in the universe, and yet it displays no pattern.
It pops up later in mathematics with alarming frequency, connecting branches of mathematics that initially seemed disconnected. Building bridges, if you like. The number is so fundamental to mathematics and to the universe that every culture on earth has the same name for it, pi. Even in school, we get a glimpse of its central role in building bridges to connect different branches of mathematics with Euler’s famous formula, (
) I first encountered this simple looking formula as a 17 year old sixth former and this formula still fills me with awe and wonder today.
The number π kept popping up in my own fumbling with elementary mathematics after leaving school. I remember the sense of awe, verging on disbelief, when, with just one piece of plain paper and a pencil, a few mathematical symbols could describe the structure of space and time in the universe, and, in less than one side of A4 paper, predict the existence of black holes. π was on that page. Pencil, paper and mathematics. You can predict the existence of black holes without leaving the room, without leaving your seat. If that isn’t awesome, I’m not sure what is!
If we regard mathematics as a tool, it surely must be one the most significant and powerful tools that humankind has at its disposal. To have Professor Châu, one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians turning his mathematical talents to the cause of peace and inter-cultural cooperation is surely an awesome and awe-inspiring use of that tool.
As a school, we have a well-established bridge that connects us to the International Peace Foundation and the work of the Bridges programme and it is a pleasure today to be supporting the work of the Foundation. Our students are all working towards the Diploma of the International Baccalaureate, the IB. The IB has a mission which is unashamedly altruistic and audaciously ambitious. The mission is to, “create a better, more peaceful world through inter-cultural understanding and respect”and to do so through education.
That is an awe-inspiring mission and we are proud to be involved, we are proud to help our intelligent, respectful, caring young global citizens prepare to step up and to play their part for the future peace and security of the world that we pass on to them. We are proud also, to now be able to play our part in supporting the International Peace Foundation in their mission and perhaps instil a sense of awe and wonder in the young hearts and minds before me today.
It now gives me great pleasure to welcome our distinguished guest, the mathematician who first proved the fundamental lemma for Lie algebras and for unitary groups, recipient of the Oberwolfach Prize and the Prix Sophie Germain de l’Académie des Sciences de Paris. Head of the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics in Hanoi and Recipient of the 2010 Fields Medal for proving the fundamental lemma for the general case, and the first recipient from a less economically developed country.
Please welcome Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Ngô Bảo Châu
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