{"id":79,"date":"2025-05-23T03:19:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T19:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/84news.top\/index.php\/2025\/05\/23\/the-pioneering-vietnamese-professor-taught-by-french-maths-genius\/"},"modified":"2025-05-23T03:19:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T19:19:17","slug":"the-pioneering-vietnamese-professor-taught-by-french-maths-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/23\/the-pioneering-vietnamese-professor-taught-by-french-maths-genius\/","title":{"rendered":"The pioneering Vietnamese professor taught by French maths genius"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sinh met Grothendieck, one of the most important figures of 20th-century mathematics, in 1967 when he was teaching algebra to students and teachers in northern Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Despite the bombs, Grothendieck — considered to have revolutionised maths in the way Albert Einstein did physics — spent a month in the country, driven by a sense of duty to fellow academics working in impossible circumstances. <\/p>\n

“He was a very good teacher. He knew how to make difficult things easy,” recalled Sinh.<\/p>\n

At the time, the University of Hanoi was scattered across several villages in the countryside to escape bombings targeting the capital.<\/p>\n

Grothendieck, Sinh and the other students lived with farmers, without electricity or running water. <\/p>\n

“Their houses were small (but) they kept a corner for us, just enough to put a work table,” she said. <\/p>\n

Despite the hardship and destruction, Grothendieck — who in 1966 won the Fields Medal, regarded as the Nobel Prize for mathematics — wrote in a travel report that his hosts maintained “a quiet confidence in the future”.<\/p>\n

Sinh proposed a thesis topic to Grothendieck, who immediately accepted, and so began a struggle to complete it that would last nearly eight years, without a library or typewriter.<\/p>\n

She received two letters from her mentor, who by that time had left Vietnam, but they were “very brief” to avoid censorship, she explained.<\/p>\n

Paper was a luxury<\/p>\n

Sinh devoted herself to her work at night after the classes she taught. <\/p>\n

But at sunset, “I was eaten by mosquitoes”, she said, recalling her dreams of a battery-powered light to replace her kerosene lamp — a fire hazard — so that she could shelter under a mosquito net.<\/p>\n

Although she completed her work in late 1972 under the thunder of the B-52s, her thesis defence had to wait until May 1975, a few days after the fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the war.<\/p>\n

On the jury at Paris Diderot University were Grothendieck and Laurent Schwartz, a fellow Fields Medal laureate who was also sympathetic to the Vietnamese cause. <\/p>\n

Students and teachers were surprised to see two laureates on the panel, she recalled, still visibly moved by the memory.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Grothendieck’s intervention, the university accepted her handwritten thesis — likely the first they had ever received, Sinh said with a smile, remembering that even finding paper during the war was a luxury.<\/p>\n

Portraits of Grothendieck and Schwartz now hang in the entrance to lecture halls at Hanoi’s Thang Long University, which she founded.<\/p>\n

Students tapping on their phones in front of the paintings confessed to AFP they hadn’t heard of the two men.<\/p>\n

Today, Sinh visits the institution once a week, where she likes to feed the pigeons. <\/p>\n

The students are “happy”, she reflects. <\/p>\n

“When you tell them things that happened, how life was, they can’t believe it. They are lucky,” she said.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2025 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hanoi (AFP) \u2013 <\/span> As American bombers flew overhead, pioneering professor Hoang Xuan Sinh completed her thesis by the light of a kerosene lamp in the Vietnamese jungle, with letters from French maths genius Alexandre Grothendieck as her only guidance. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Issued on: 23\/05\/2025 – 05:19<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/span> 3 min Reading time<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\"Hoang<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudfclub.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}