The Vietnamese mathematician Hô Hai Phùng was awarded the von Kaven Prize in Mathematics on 26 March 2007. He received this personal prize, which was awarded for the second time this year, in recognition of his outstanding work on quantum groups. The award ceremony took place during a joint conference in Berlin, held by the German Association of Mathematicians and the German Society for Mathematical Didactics from 25 - 30 March. The von Kaven Prize in Mathematics is endowed with 10,000 euros and is financed by the von Kaven Foundation, established in December 2004 by Herbert von Kaven (from Detmold) and the DFG.
Hô Hai Phùng is a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working closely with the group around the winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Professor Hélène Esnault and Professor Eckart Viehweg. Hô Hai Phùng was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, and has been funded by the DFG’s Heisenberg Programme since 2003. His talent was noticed at the age of 17, while a member of the Vietnamese Mathematics Olympics team, and he was sent to study at the Lomonossow University in Moscow, where he earned his degree at the age of 22. After the fall of the Soviet Union he continued his studies in Munich, where he obtained his doctorate at 26. This was followed by research visits to Hanoi and various research institutes in Europe and the USA. In 2004 he qualified as a university lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Essen campus) with his postdoctoral thesis entitled "On Representation Theory of Matrix Quantum Groups of Type A".
The research projects he plans to conduct with his Heisenberg fellowship build on his previous work on Tannaka duality and will expand on it with important new research topics relating to algebraic geometry such as the vector bundle theory and fundamental groups of projective varieties.