Professor Vu Ha Van of Yale University, who is also a member of the Scientific Council of Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, has been awarded the prestigious Fulkerson Prize 2012 for his group work determining the threshold of edge density above which a random graph can be covered by disjoint copies of any given smaller graph.

Professor Vu Ha Van left and his family in the US 

The prize was presented to Van and his two colleagues Anders Johansson of Sweden and Jeff Kahn of the US at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming in Berlin to recognise their published work on Random Structures and Algorithms No 33 in 2008.

The Fulkerson Prize was established in 1979 to honour outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics. Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented every three years. The prize is sponsored by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society.

Van, 42, was a gifted mathematics student in Vietnam before attending univeristy in Hungary and receiving his PhD from Yale University in the US. He has worked in many research institutes in the US including IAS and Microsoft Research, as well as at Rutger and Santiago universities.

Van, who is currently in Vietnam to attend a mathematical symposium in Hue City, also received the George Polya award, presented by the US's Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in 2008.