Van Ha Vu is appointed the Percey F. Smith Professorship of Mathematics

Van Ha Vu, newly named as the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics, studies combinatorics, probability, additive number theory, and theoretical computer science.

Vu received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1998 and joined the Yale faculty in 2011, after serving as a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and the University of California-San Diego.

Vu has been invited to give more than 120 lectures at universities around the world. He is the editor of Combinatorica, the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and Communications in Contemporary Mathematics, among other publications. In 2006, Vu and Terence Tao (UCLA) co-authored the book “Additive Combinatorics,” which has become the standard reference in modern combinatorics. In 2007, he led the special program at the Institute for Advance Study in this field of research.

The Yale mathematician was honored with the 2012 Fulkerson Prize of the American Mathematics Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society, as well as the 2008 George Pólya Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.