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In an interview published March 16 by the South China Morning Postthe 53-year-old mathematician said his decision to leave the University of Chicago, where he has chaired the mathematics department since 2023, was driven not only by a deteriorating academic climate in the U.S. but by a broader ambition: building Asia into a global intellectual powerhouse.

“I want Asia to be the next America or the next Europe [as] a place where science and mathematics strive,” he told the newspaper in an interview on the campus of the University of Hong Kong, where he will take up a chair professorship in June.

He said he believed Asia and China had “a unique opportunity to grow to be one of the [top] places in science and mathematics,” and that he was eager to participate.

Prof. Chau acknowledged the region still lacked a critical mass of senior mathematicians able to devote time to training the next generation. But he said the potential was enormous because many of the world’s best students now come from Asia.

Mathematical research, he noted, does not require expensive equipment or supercomputers. “Just a blackboard and chalk are enough to do a lot,” he said, adding that what matters more is international collaboration, because breakthroughs tend to emerge from the exchange of ideas between colleagues, mentors and students.

He described Hong Kong, a meeting point between East and West, as ideally positioned to serve as a bridge connecting research communities from China, India, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore.

Mathematicians, he said, work more effectively through natural collaboration than competition, and he hopes to foster those ties across the continent.

Prof. Chau also took aim at the growing fixation on publication metrics in academia. He said the pressure to meet annual paper quotas may suit mid-tier institutions but is counterproductive at the top level.

“If you have to publish a paper every few months, it’s very difficult to produce groundbreaking work in mathematics,” he told the South China Morning Postciting the advice of his postdoctoral supervisor in France: “Don’t write bad papers.”

After many years in the West, he said this was the right time to return to Asia, both to be closer to family and to contribute directly to the region’s scientific development.

Prof. Chau won the Fields Medal in 2010 for proving the fundamental lemma of the Langlands program, a problem that had been open for three decades. His proof was named one of Time magazine’s top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.

Born in Hanoi in 1972, he attended the High School for Gifted Students under the Hanoi University of Science and became the first Vietnamese contestant to win two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, in 1988 and 1989, the first with a perfect score of 42 out of 42.

He earned his PhD at 25 from the University of Paris-Sud and at 33 became Vietnam’s youngest-ever professor.

He has served as scientific director of the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) since 2011 and joined the University of Chicago in 2010.

His move to Hong Kong comes as HKU aggressively recruits top mathematical talent. The university also recently hired Vietnamese mathematician Vu Ha Van, a leading expert in combinatorics and probability, from Yale.

Beyond his own research in pure mathematics, Prof. Chau plans to use his proximity to Vietnam to deepen his involvement in training young mathematicians there. He has launched a cooperation program between VIASM and Vietnam National University, Hanoi, offering doctoral students tuition waivers and living stipends of VND7.5-15 million (US$286-573) per month, funded by the Vietnam Innovation in Education Fund.

In March, he also announced the “Converging Scholars” program, recruiting six Vietnamese professors based in the U.S., France and Germany to return regularly and mentor doctoral candidates at VIASM.

He said he expects the initiative to produce a generation of mathematics PhDs trained domestically who can compete at the international level.