Ngo bao chau biography of william

Vietnamese-born mathematician Ngo Bao Chau on Thursday won the maths world's version of a Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, cementing a journey that has taken him from war-torn Hanoi to the pages of Time magazine.

Ngo, 38, was awarded his medal in a ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians meeting in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad.

The other three recipients were Israeli mathematician Elon Lindenstrauss, Frenchman Cedric Villani and Swiss-based Russian Stanislav Smirnov.

Ngo, who was born in Hanoi in 1972 in the waning years of the Vietnam war, was cited for his "brilliant proof" of a 30-year-old mathematical conundrum known as the Fundamental Lemma.

The proof offered a key stepping stone to establishing and exploring a revolutionary theory put forward in 1979 by Canadian-American mathematician Robert Langlands that connected two branches of mathematics called number theory and group theory.

Ngo's a