Vietnamese female professor in France determined to bring applied mathematics work back home

Prof. Dr. Le Thi Hoai An shared with VTC News at the 2024 Influential Vietnamese Forum event held in Paris, France.

After more than 30 years of “immersing” herself in numbers and algorithms in the fields of Optimization Mathematics and Computer Science, Prof. Dr. Le Thi Hoai An (University of Lorraine, France) is at the peak of her career. With the highest title of a university professor in France.

Every year, Professor Hoai An still flies from France to Vietnam to develop the center for applied mathematics and computational technology called CTOPTIMAL. Currently, the institute has researched and produced many international-class technology products.

Youngest math teacher

Born and raised in a family with a tradition of education, his father is Associate Professor of Literary Theory Le Ba Han, his mother is teacher Nguyen Thi Loc, who teaches specialized Mathematics in high school, since childhood, Professor Hoai An has been exposed to numbers and endless sources of knowledge.

Because she was good at both literature and math, Professor Hoai An could have chosen to follow her father’s literary career or follow her mother’s natural science path to study numbers. But having loved math since she was a child, she decided to continue her mother’s dream.

With her inherent confidence and resilience, becoming a trainee lecturer at the age of 21 did not make Professor Hoai An feel difficult or too pressured, because this is the profession she loves.

However, when she graduated from the Mathematics Department of Hanoi Pedagogical University 1 (now Hanoi Pedagogical University), there was one memory that the female professor will always remember - that she was "specially granted" a position to stay and teach at the department.

“Right at the time I finished 4 years of university, Hanoi Pedagogical University 1 had an excess of staff. But with a total score of 36 points in four exams, as the valedictorian of the Mathematics department, I decided to write a letter and went directly to Minister Nguyen Thi Binh’s house to give the letter to her.

In the letter, I expressed my wish to stay at the school to teach and continue my studies. Women also have a certain age to develop their own careers. With the intervention of the Minister, I became the youngest lecturer in the Mathematics Department in 1980.”,Professor Hoai An recounted.

Sharing her motivation for writing a letter to the Minister of Education, Professor Hoai An said that everything in life that came to her was by default random and out of necessity. She set a goal of teaching and doing research at university, so she tried every way to stay at school to complete the lowest degree of Associate Doctor (in the old way of calling).

Global algorithm

After more than 10 years of teaching at the Faculty of Mathematics, Hanoi National University of Education, Professor Hoai An was sent to study for a master's degree at Joseph - Fourrier Grenoble University (France) and successfully defended her doctoral thesis in Optimization and Operations Research at Rouen University with an excellent degree. Two and a half years later, she continued to defend her doctoral thesis in science with many valuable contributions to this field.

It was the work in Professor Hoai An's doctoral thesis that created a spectacular breakthrough for the development of an algorithm called "DCA" for biconvex programming (abbreviated as DC programming, or in English DC programming), a fundamental and extremely difficult field of Optimization Mathematics.

The DCA optimization algorithm was founded by her husband - Professor Pham Dinh Tao in 1985 as a generalization for DC planning of the works in his own doctoral thesis in 1981.

“When my husband proposed this method, he had some graduate students apply it to some practical problems but it was not successful. It was several years later, when I started my doctoral thesis, that DCA was effectively exploited to solve a class of nonlinear programming problems that the American research school was interested in and invested a lot of effort in. Leading researchers in the US and the world highly appreciated this algorithm, this was a breakthrough to develop DCA for many other classes of problems," said Professor Hoai An.

According to Professor Hoai An, her husband was also the one who introduced her to the world of Applied Mathematics in general and the DCA algorithm in particular. Talking about research, the couple always sympathizes and appreciates the two words"exploration and adventure".

With a history of 40 years, DC planning and DCA have become classic tools in today's scientific community. Many prestigious universities (Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, New York) and large technology/industry companies (Microsoft, Google, Ndivia, Alibaba, Nasa, Fujitsu, NAVAL Group, RTE, ...) have used this tool to solve problems in many different fields such as: data science, especially machine learning, communication systems, transportation - logistics, production management, energy, environment, finance, biology, mechanics, information security, robotics, medicine ...

For a researcher, nothing is more valuable than having their product trusted and used effectively by many people.

Professor Le Thi Hoai An

Dream of building an applied mathematics research institute

Not only passionate about research, Professor Hoai An is also attracted by technology transfer from scientific achievements. That has been the guiding principle for her research activities for many years.

Realizing the importance of applying mathematics to practice, the couple has cherished the dream of building an applied mathematics institute in Vietnam for 25 years. Since then, Professor Hoai An and his wife have carried out many activities to materialize this idea.

They always try to expand the field of Vietnamese applied mathematics by giving priority to guiding Vietnamese PhD students. In addition to scholarships from the Vietnamese government, Professor Hoai An also offers many French scholarships and his own research projects to Vietnamese PhD students.

Professor Hoai An and his wife made the first contributions to the construction of the Franco-Vietnamese University of Technology (USTH) in Hanoi since 2009 and have been active members of the group of seven French universities training masters in applied mathematics for Ho Chi Minh City National University for many years.

It was not until 2012, when a team of more than a dozen PhDs in applied mathematics trained by my husband and I in France returned to work at many major universities in Hanoi, that the idea of ​​an applied mathematics research center was really put into practice.

According to Professor Hoai An, the doctoral thesis is just the beginning of a research career. She and her husband always wanted to create a “scientific playground” for their former graduate students to continue their research. This was the motivation that pushed them to carry out their plan at that time.

The Director of the Academy of Posts and Telecommunications actively supported this project and arranged the facilities for the center to operate. Unfortunately, the project had just been implemented when there was a change in the Academy's leadership, so it had to stop at the internal level.

A few years later, the leadership of the International Faculty, Hanoi National University (now International School) invited them to establish a Research Lab on Data Science and Optimization of Complex Systems, with about 20 members.

Professor Hoai An said that at first everything went quite smoothly, scientific seminars were held weekly. But then a problem arose with the mechanism, causing the project to stagnate:“The center is located at one school but many members work at other schools. This is not suitable for the operating mechanism of universities in Vietnam, especially when some schools have started planning to establish research groups within their schools.

At that time, a famous software company in Ho Chi Minh City invited the couple to build a data science and computing center for cooperation between the two sides. Professor Hoai An and his wife simultaneously joined another large corporation in Hanoi until the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.

Talking about her future plans, Professor Hoai An revealed that she is still passionate and working tirelessly to build optimal solutions that are widely used for challenging and potential practical applications in future industries.

It is known that the female professor and her husband are transferring the development of applied mathematics to former graduate students who are playing important and key roles in faculties and universities in Vietnam. The female professor hopes that the mechanism will help them do better than her.

Currently, Professor Hoai An still regularly travels back to Vietnam to build and develop his own projects, and participates in many scientific cooperation programs, teaching and training masters and doctors with many domestic universities.