Professors Gyo Taek Jin and Paul Jung Received Awards from the Korean Mathematical Society

The Korean Mathematical Society (KMS) held its 2018 Spring Meeting on April 20-22 at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. During the conference, recipients of the education achievement award, best paper award, and best doctoral dissertation award were announced and the prizes were presented to the winners.

Professors Gyo Taek Jin and Paul Jung of the Mathematical Sciences Department at KAIST received, respectively, an Award for the Advancement of Mathematics Education and an Excellent Research Paper Award, respectively. Dr. Yonghwa Cho, an alumnus from the class of 2017, won a Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. KAIST was the only university that garnered awards in all three categories.

The Award for the Advancement of Mathematics Education is given to those who have made outstanding contributions to fostering talent and promoting interest in mathematics. Professor Gyo Taek Jin was recognized for his leadership role in improving mathematics teaching and learning in higher education over the past 30 years. In addition to Professor Jin, Professor Sunwook Hwang from Soongsil University took this award.

Professor Jin graduated from Seoul National University and earned his BS and MS degrees in 1978 and 1983. He then moved to the US and obtained a Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1988 from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Since coming to KAIST in 1989, Professor Jin has been researching low-dimensional topology, geometric topology, and knot theory. With his long record of research and academic achievements, he has helped the growth of the Korean mathematical community.

His service includes roles as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Korean Mathematical Society, Korean team leader of the 40^th International Mathematical Olympiad, chairman of the jury of the 41^st International Mathematical Olympiad, deputy editor of the Journal of the Korean Society of Mathematical Education Series B: The Pure and Applied Mathematics, editorial board member of the Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, member of the Topology Subcommittee of the Korean Mathematical Society, and committee member of the East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics.

In 2017, Professor Paul Jung co-authored and published a paper in one of the most influential journals in the field of probability, The Annals of Probability, with Takashi Owada (Purdue University) and Gennady Samorodnitsky (Cornell University). The KMS selected his paper entitled “Functional Central Limit Theorem for a Class of Negatively Dependent Heavy-tailed Stationary Infinitely Divisible Processes Generated by Conservative Flows” for an Excellent Research Paper Award. The other winner for this award was a Chinese mathematician, Pak Tung Ho of Sogang University.

In the paper, Professor Jung and his coauthors proved that a functional central limit theorem for partial sums of symmetric stationary long-range dependent heavy tailed infinitely divisible processes with a certain type of negative dependence. The KMS lauded the paper as a result of high-quality research with an important impact on the field.

Professor Jung joined KAIST in 2016 and has been working on research in statistics mechanics and probability theory. Prior to KAIST, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow, an assistant professor at Sogang University, and an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received his BS in 1997 from Rice University and a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003.

Meanwhile, the KMS created a new award for young mathematicians to support their work and encourage them to mature into career researchers. The Best Doctoral Dissertation Award is offered to researchers who have written a dissertation for Ph.D. in mathematics and graduated from universities in Korea within the last two years.

Four emerging researchers were chosen for the award, and one of them was Dr. Yonghwa Cho. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. With his academic adviser Yongnam Lee, he wrote his paper, “On Derived Categories of Algebraic Surfaces Constructed via Q-Gorenstein Smoothings,” which was published in a renowned journal, Advances in Mathematics, in 2017.